· Content
· News
· Articles
· Mailinglists
· Knowledgebase
· Trouble Tickets
· Files
· Glossary
· Links
· Compatibility Lists
· Forums
Welcome to our website
To take full advantage of all features you need to login or register. Registration is completely free and takes only a few seconds.
Itanium sales fall $13.4bn shy of $14bn forecast
Posted by: duke on: 03/30/2005 03:12 PM [ Print | 49 comment(s) ]
The Register is reporting that Itanium sales over the first two quarters have fallen quite short of initial projections.
In actual fact, total Itanium sales have hit $606m through the first two quarters of this year. Other organs might mock a $13.4bn miss by one of the world's leading number crunching firms but not us. We'll let you come to your own conclusions about such an incredible gaffe.You can read the entire report over here.
Related Stories
12/03/2004 03:27 PM: Intel may buy out HP Itanium crew by duke
For those of you craving Itanium-related news, according to The Inquirer, Intel may buy out HP's Itanium crew. But the more sensational rumor which we're unable yet to confirm is that HP's far from in...
10/27/2004 01:56 PM: Itanium Powers NASA Supercomputer by duke
The Inquirer also has a post up about a new supercomputer that NASA has thrown together using Itanium2 processors. The $50 million machine is a cluster of 20 computers built by NASA's Ames Research Ce...
09/27/2004 02:47 PM: Itanium unsuitable for workstations, Intel says by duke
The Inquirer is discussing a statement by an Intel rep in the Wall Street Journal. Apparently Itanium was never really important to the workstation market? THE ITANIUM was never really important for t...
09/20/2004 03:32 PM: IBM mocks Itanium server sales - again by duke
The Register is letting us know that IBM has decided to mock Itanium sales... again. It's fairly typical for IBM to poke fun at Itanium despite its place behind HP and SGI in sales of servers based on...
09/13/2004 03:03 PM: The Solaris on Itanium discussion stalls again by duke
The Register is reporting that previously discussed plans on making Solaris available for Itanium might be stalling. When asked by The Register about Solaris on Itanium, Intel's new server processor c...
09/02/2004 03:06 PM: Intel Itanium Madison 9M delayed? by duke
The Inquirer is running a short report on the apparent delay of Intel's next Itanium processor, the Madison 9M. It speculates that the delay may have been caused by its lightning shift to dual cores, ...
08/31/2004 02:14 PM: Itanium sales fall $13.4bn shy of $14bn forecast by duke
The Register is reporting that Intel's Itanium sales haven't hit the forcasts set by IDC. Okay, well, not quite $14bn. That's the total analyst powerhouse IDC had once predicted Itanium would reach by...
08/25/2004 03:23 PM: Intel pledges to bring Itanium down to Xeon price-point by Jim_
The Register is reporting that Intel plans on bringing Itanium down to Xeon's price-point by 2007. So Intel is essentially planning to subsidise Itanium-supporting server OEMs' margins. They'll be abl...
08/20/2004 02:30 PM: OpenVMS on Itanium = Fast? by Jim_
The Inquirer is reporting that OpenVMS seems to run quite fast on Intel's Itanium. ... a presentation given at HP World by OpenVMS engineer Greg Jordan indicates that the operating system running on I...
07/28/2004 02:05 PM: NASA to use giant SGI Linux Itanium cluster by Jim_
The Inquirer has some information posted about a cluster that NASA is putting together. Imagine 10,240 Itaniums working in tandem. The system consists of twenty 512 CPU SGI Altix systems, using 500TB ...
For those of you craving Itanium-related news, according to The Inquirer, Intel may buy out HP's Itanium crew. But the more sensational rumor which we're unable yet to confirm is that HP's far from in...
10/27/2004 01:56 PM: Itanium Powers NASA Supercomputer by duke
The Inquirer also has a post up about a new supercomputer that NASA has thrown together using Itanium2 processors. The $50 million machine is a cluster of 20 computers built by NASA's Ames Research Ce...
09/27/2004 02:47 PM: Itanium unsuitable for workstations, Intel says by duke
The Inquirer is discussing a statement by an Intel rep in the Wall Street Journal. Apparently Itanium was never really important to the workstation market? THE ITANIUM was never really important for t...
09/20/2004 03:32 PM: IBM mocks Itanium server sales - again by duke
The Register is letting us know that IBM has decided to mock Itanium sales... again. It's fairly typical for IBM to poke fun at Itanium despite its place behind HP and SGI in sales of servers based on...
09/13/2004 03:03 PM: The Solaris on Itanium discussion stalls again by duke
The Register is reporting that previously discussed plans on making Solaris available for Itanium might be stalling. When asked by The Register about Solaris on Itanium, Intel's new server processor c...
09/02/2004 03:06 PM: Intel Itanium Madison 9M delayed? by duke
The Inquirer is running a short report on the apparent delay of Intel's next Itanium processor, the Madison 9M. It speculates that the delay may have been caused by its lightning shift to dual cores, ...
08/31/2004 02:14 PM: Itanium sales fall $13.4bn shy of $14bn forecast by duke
The Register is reporting that Intel's Itanium sales haven't hit the forcasts set by IDC. Okay, well, not quite $14bn. That's the total analyst powerhouse IDC had once predicted Itanium would reach by...
08/25/2004 03:23 PM: Intel pledges to bring Itanium down to Xeon price-point by Jim_
The Register is reporting that Intel plans on bringing Itanium down to Xeon's price-point by 2007. So Intel is essentially planning to subsidise Itanium-supporting server OEMs' margins. They'll be abl...
08/20/2004 02:30 PM: OpenVMS on Itanium = Fast? by Jim_
The Inquirer is reporting that OpenVMS seems to run quite fast on Intel's Itanium. ... a presentation given at HP World by OpenVMS engineer Greg Jordan indicates that the operating system running on I...
07/28/2004 02:05 PM: NASA to use giant SGI Linux Itanium cluster by Jim_
The Inquirer has some information posted about a cluster that NASA is putting together. Imagine 10,240 Itaniums working in tandem. The system consists of twenty 512 CPU SGI Altix systems, using 500TB ...
« Intel Tops Off 64-Bit Server Platform Portfolio · Itanium sales fall $13.4bn shy of $14bn forecast
· Dueling Multicores: The Fight for the Future »
2 pages 1 2
Comment
duraid Registered User Posts: 378 Joined: 2002-03-31 |
![]()
...or not. Think about what happens to the importance of CPU price when you go and buy 128GB of RAM and 10 or so disks to go with your nice new server. |
Comment
duraid Registered User Posts: 378 Joined: 2002-03-31 |
![]()
hi!! ![]() |
Comment
duraid Registered User Posts: 378 Joined: 2002-03-31 |
![]()
You're American right? Thanks to the free market, you got to eat McDonalds for 30 years because, like it or not, that's what the market chose and now your entire population is basically the biggest bunch of overweight slobs on the planet. Great!! Look, I fully appreciate the point you're trying to make, but here's the deal. A lot of the time, probably even most of the time, people can make good choices in a free market, especially when they have a good understanding of what it is they are buying, and good information on the different choices available. Things like basic education and personal experience help with the understanding bit. Things like advertising police (anyone remember the G5 ads being banned in the UK?) and even tools like pricewatch and froogle help with the bit about information. Research has shown time and time again that _without_ a supportive environment, people can and will make bad decisions, choosing things that can even affect their health or outright kill them, sometimes for as simple reasons as "everyone else is doing it, so I think I will too." If you really need me to dig up references on this (some of the pretty shocking experiments done with children in the 40s, for example), i'll get around to it one day. Some of the studies that have been done are good for a laugh, others are downright scary. Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand - Itanium sales - the story is quite different. First of all, we can forget about 95% of the computing market to begin with - the people who don't want to spend more than $2000 on a computer. They can't even afford Itanium gear so the choice between itanium and x86 is already made for them. End of story. If, looking at the first Itanium prices in the late 90's, IDC thought that Itanium was going to reach that price point by 2004 (if ever), well, I think that says more about IDC than it does about Itanium. Moving up the market a bit, let's say the $5k to $50k range, the story is a bit different. The sort of people buying hardware in this range are likely to have some good knowledge about computer hardware (much better than the average person, but by no means expert - consider the typical "PHB" who wants to buy luxurious PCs for all the executives in the office, say...), but what do they see in the market? Here, AMD is chanting as loud as it possibly can, "you want to buy our x86-64 solution, because it gives you top performance on your current programs, and it's VERY EXPENSIVE to change your software, you know. Backwards compatibility is SUPER IMPORTANT!!!!!" PHB or not, if all you're going to spend on computer equipment is between $5k to $50k (this means you're an individual or a SMALL business), this argument is directly relevant. Relative to such an outlay on hardware, it might actually cost you several thousand $$ in programmer time to tune software on POWER, Itanium or whatever other alternative you had in mind, assuming you even have a programmer handy to begin with! And if you don't even have any serious IT people, backwards compatibility probably _is_ very important. Change your software and end up screwed? Not good!! Jumping to the very high end - $1million and up - what's the market like here? Well, you have very good market information because it's likely that companies like HP, IBM, SGI and so on will send representatives out to you, to tell you everything they can about their products (and dirt on the competitors too but you can always laugh that off, since you'll be talking to the competitor the very next day....) You also have good information on the product specifics since heck, you can almost certainly at least try out your software on a system, usually with the free assistance of a company engineer, if not even get a trial system on loan, to see how well it runs your actual workload. And if you're spending more than $1m on hardware, I should damn well hope you have a good understanding of computer hardware, but you'd be surprised how many times have chosen their server vendor based on whether or not there are sexy flashing LEDs on the front. No, really. I could name names but I won't. ![]() Now, it's not unconceivable that one day Intel might go "**** you AMD, we're going to own you now", and start shipping 90nm Itanium 3s with twin Pentium M cores on-chip for $500. Don't laugh, it doesn't cost them that much to make the chips and adding the PM cores would only increase the die size by 10%. Pentium M cores run pretty cool too, they could certainly take care of the power issues. But apart from being a bad business strategy, guess what AMD would do if Intel tried this. They'd run to the federal trade commission screaming "NO FAIR, Intel are selling massive chips for less than we can make them, they're abusing their market position, intel are evil, help usl!!!!!!!". And they'd be right to do so - Intel would be abusing their market position and it'd certainly be bad news if AMD had to close up shop. But what would happen in the long run? Eventually, Intel could drop the Pentium M cores from two to one as more software got tuned for the Itanium cores and people saw their software running faster on Itanium. After another 10 years, they could drop the P-M (or whatever) x86 hardware completely, since the x86 software emulation gets you a pretty decent fraction of 'real' x86 speed nowdays. And what would we be left with? A completely changed architecture (for the better, even AMD engineers have publicly agreed on this, go watch that stanford lecture series again CAREFULLY if you don't believe me). _All_ consumers would be better off in the long run. But getting from here to there is impossible if *all* you have to go by is the free market. And finally, remember that we're completely forgetting what Intel want to do with Itanium. They control this, remember. They have some control over the clock speeds of their x86 and Itanium parts. They control their marketing. And last but not least, they control the price. If all Intel want to do with Itanium is tackle the (pretty lucrative) high-end market, they can do so, and a very easy way to do that is price them out of consumer reach. So basically, all the register article proves is that IDC did not correctly predict how much Intel wanted to turn Itanium into a mass-market product (if at all). Make no mistake, Intel is a ******* giant compared to AMD and they could, if they wanted, be assholes and force Itanium on everyone. Me? I'm OK with the situation today. x86 gets a boost, so everyone wins at the low-end. And on the high end, I get to use Itanium instead of being stuck with Alpha (RIP, but Itanium is better) or POWER. I'm happy! Judging by the pretty huge rate at which Itanium sales have been growing, I'm not the only one either. Maybe Itanium (or some future derivative of it) will become prevalent in the mass market one day? Who knows. Baby steps first. |
Comment
Jim_ Administrator Posts: 3577 Joined: 2000-03-15 |
![]() Good post duraid. [url="http://www.jimkirk.org"]jimkirk.org[/url] - Not a Myth any Longer. Just a Dad. |
Comment
Mr Bill two by two, hands of blue Posts: 2939 Joined: 2002-02-16 |
![]() Duraid, a thoughtful and informative post that gives some perspective. My SMP rig [URL="http://personal.palouse.net/billshan/ghost.htm#A_Merlin"]Merlin[/URL] |
Comment
rmn oh my, it's huge! Posts: 5894 Joined: 2002-01-26 |
![]()
Congratulations, you've managed to out-Duraid Duraid. ![]() The Itanium exists. It's manufactured and marketed by the biggest CPU maker in the world, and aimed at markets where AMD's presence was less than 1%. If it's losing market even to (what you call) "a technologically inferior patchwork", released by a firm 50 times smaller, then it must really stink. :rolleyes: The technological self-righteousness argument is ridiculous. In the real world, "superior" doesn't mean "looks neater on paper". It means it lets people get the job done faster, or cheaper, or both. Just because something is complicated and confusing, that doesn't mean it's "inferior" (look at biology - complete mess, but amazingly efficient). I looked at the IA64 programming guides when they were released (in the 19th century), and thought everything looked very neat, but some things were oddly missing (ex., shift-rotate operations, IIRC). I could see a few, very specific, cases where it would blow everything else away, but I wondered how well it would perform in the real world. Still, I made a mental note to keep an eye on it, and even made plans to buy a couple of Itaniums if they turned out to be any good at 3D rendering. They didn't. AFAIK, only one relevant renderer was actually released for IA64, and the performance was very poor. You can blame the compilers (as some Mac people do ![]() And it seems not even the people at Intel were able to port and optimise existing software for the Itanium. Despite the Itanium's supposedly brilliant FPU, Intel spent the last 5 years working with a couple of companies to optimise their 3D renderers for... the P4. I'm pretty sure that companies that buy render farms consisting of thousands of nodes would be an interesting market for the Itanium... if it could really deliver better performance than the competition. As it exists today, the Itanium is not the best solution for 99% of people (and I'm talking about people that could afford it, if it gave them any advantage, not people that use their systems to read e-mail). Looking at Intel's statements about the IPF over the years, it's pretty obvious they had bigger plans for it (or maybe the people making those statements were deliberately lying to push their share price up). If those plans failed it was either due to Intel's own incompetence (at marketing, development, support, understanding what their clients really wanted, etc.) or due to the fact that their competitors (IBM, Sun, AMD, etc.) released better products. If there was absolutely no competition, then maybe Intel could "push the Itanium down our throats", and force everyone to adopt it. Maybe that was their mistake (it certainly has parallels with Intel's recent history in other market segments). But there was (and still is) competition. If they want the Itanium to reach a broader market (which I suspect some departments inside Intel do, and some don't), they will have to offer a better product. Having tons of money helps (a lot), but it's no guarantee of success. RMN ~~~ |
Comment
nine Registered User Posts: 1303 Joined: 2004-03-11 |
![]()
Take that back right now. You know as well as I do that there's no place for "thoughtful and informative" on the internets. |
Comment
glitch Registered User Posts: 1171 Joined: 2000-11-18 |
![]() We just bought 600 opterons. We considered Itaniums but they were slower and much more expensive. That was a pretty easy business decision. |
Comment
Jim_ Administrator Posts: 3577 Joined: 2000-03-15 |
![]()
[url="http://www.jimkirk.org"]jimkirk.org[/url] - Not a Myth any Longer. Just a Dad. |
Comment
LRSeriesIII Aspiring Rocket Scientist Posts: 1120 Joined: 2002-08-29 |
![]()
I think we are trying to get at the same idea, something Duraid mentioned as well: the Register articles both are written in a manner which implicates that Intel has failed by not meeting IDC predictions. In fact, it is IDC that has failed to accurately predict Intel's performance. It only really becomes a failure on Intel's side if they intended to achieve higher sales numbers with the Itanium, but we have no information on that in these links (again, that I noticed), so unless someone wants to post such information it really is unfair to fault Intel here.
Intel is a for-profit, publicly owned company. Intel's goal in life is to have earn as much money as possible for its owners. Nothing else. This is not "good" or "bad," it is just the way the system is set up. I think that the biggest problem with this whole discussion is an issue with definitions, specifically the definition of "success" and "failure." What does/would it mean for Intel's Itanium to be a success? What about a failure? You can define a specific goal, and then discuss Intel's performance in achieving that goal. It does not really matter what the goal is. I can say that Itanium is a failure at increasing my height, because (to the best of my knowledge) I am just as tall as I would be if Itanium was never created. Of course, that is a pretty stupid statement on my part, not because it is wrong, but because there is no way Itanium could have made me taller (well, I suppose I could tape a few to the soles of my shoes, but you get my point). Yes, Intel's Itanium has failed with respect to making LRSeriesIII taller, but it was never intended to make LRSeriesIII taller, so there is really no point in even making the statement. Another example is that a 747 makes a terrible submarine. Again, the statement is true, but stupid. The only really relevant and fair goal to judge Itanium against is the ultimate goal it was created to meet. The ultimate goal is not performance, performance per dollar, performance per watt, or anything else like that. The ultimate goal of the whole Itanium project, just like everything else Intel does, is to positively affect Intel's bottom line. Now, a particular product does not have to necessarily be profitable to positively affect a company's bottom line (the iTunes software is probably not very profitable, by itself, for Apple, but it helps enable greater and/or more profitable iPod sales). Performance, performance per dollar, performance per watt, market share, et cetera...these are all interesting criteria to use when comparing Itanium to other processors, but the do not, in and of themselves, determine success. Let me use an example. Let's say I own a car company, and my company produces a sports car. Now, if lots of people want sports cars and are willing to pay any price for them, and there is a lack of competition in the segment, my sports car is likely to make my company a lot of money and be a success. However, pretend another car company comes in with a car that is inferior to mine in every technical way, slightly cheaper, but comes in red, while my sports car only comes in green. If all of the people buying sports cars care first and foremost about the color of their car (and cannot get their cars repainted), and all other features are considered secondary, sales of my sports car are going to go way down. It does not matter that I have a technically superior product. If my company is relying on profits from sales of this sports car to prop up its bottom line, then my sports car is likely to be a failure due to competition. It will not positively influence my company's bottom line. On the other hand, if my sports car solidifies the image of my car company as a performance leader, causing sales for my other (profitable) models to surge to such an extent that the additional profits are greater than any losses generated the production of my sports car, then my sports car is a success, despite having low sales. ->Computers ->Folding for team 3074 |
Comment
rmn oh my, it's huge! Posts: 5894 Joined: 2002-01-26 |
![]() That would make sense if the Itanium, the P4 and the Xeons were all "cars". The first one is more like a lorry. And I doubt anyone buys Mercedes cars based on how good their 16-wheelers are. In fact, I suspect most people have no idea how good their 16-wheelers are, or even that they make 16-wheelers. Before the Opteron (and the "AMD-compatible" Xeons), the Itanium was in a completely separate market (now they overlap a bit). And even then it was having some problems gaining market share. I doubt Itanium's existence by itself increases the sales of Intel's other CPUs. That's what the "Extreme Edition" chips are for. Impossible to find, insanely overpriced, but great for marketing. The success (or lack of it) of IPF is pretty much a self-contained thing. RMN ~~~ |
Comment
i_wolf labhair dom as gaelige Posts: 2034 Joined: 2002-11-19 |
![]()
I believe this, sir, is your dagger! Et tu brut Hung like a donkey. Go like a horse! |
Comment
Slaughter111 Registered User Posts: 714 Joined: 2002-12-22 |
![]()
Amen, couldn't have said it better... ![]() A+ | MCSA | MCITP | CommVault CVSA/CVSE | VMware VCP 4 Heatware: Slaughter111 |
Comment
LRSeriesIII Aspiring Rocket Scientist Posts: 1120 Joined: 2002-08-29 |
![]()
My point was only that the real measure of general success or failure for Itanium is how it ends up affecting Intel's bottom line. Whether it has a positive impact or negative impact, I do not know. ->Computers ->Folding for team 3074 |
Comment
glitch Registered User Posts: 1171 Joined: 2000-11-18 |
![]()
Sort of. They were slower for what everyone here wanted to do. |
Comment
Kimpsu Registered User Posts: 515 Joined: 2003-01-09 |
![]()
Like over a hundred years ago? |
Comment
duraid Registered User Posts: 378 Joined: 2002-03-31 |
![]()
Out of sheer curiosity, can you tell me what you are running on those systems, and a bit more about the systems you bought/considered? (basic specs, ballpark prices etc) Also, when you were evaluating performance, did you try to figure out _why_ the Itaniums were running slower? 600 opterons and the boxes/ram/whatever to go with them is a fair bit of money, you'd certainly be in SGI Altix territory. Are these 600 systems networked? Tightly? |
Comment
duraid Registered User Posts: 378 Joined: 2002-03-31 |
![]()
You mean post to 2cpu forums while listening to mp3s and downloading porn? OK, you certainly don't need an Itanium for that. ![]() |
Comment
rmn oh my, it's huge! Posts: 5894 Joined: 2002-01-26 |
![]()
Feels that way. It's called sarcasm. ![]() RMN ~~~ |
Comment
Hydra Performance Junkie Posts: 174 Joined: 2001-03-09 |
![]()
A brilliant post, very clear and to the point and how very true. No wonder why Intel tried to kill Alpha, PA-RISC and MIPS to make "Lebensraum" for Itanic. Like the nazis, Intel didn't succeed with their evil plans as the good guys stopped them in the act :cool: Overclocking is a blast! Do I smell something burning? ![]() |
Comment
rmn oh my, it's huge! Posts: 5894 Joined: 2002-01-26 |
![]() Intel aren't the bad guys. They (especially certain parts of their management) are just the very stupid, very stubborn, very arrogant guys. The Itanium is not all it was cracked up to be, but Intel's management and marketing dug it into a hole much deeper than it deserved, and out of which I doubt it will ever manage to climb. RMN ~~~ |
Comment
i_wolf labhair dom as gaelige Posts: 2034 Joined: 2002-11-19 |
![]() It could end up being a very small money spinner for them none the less, especially considering the coverage they have gotten as a result of SGI's supercomputers and planned usage in high end workstations. Still strange that there hasn't been a reply from resident Itanium expert yet? Would like to hear his take on things. Hung like a donkey. Go like a horse! |
Comment
terminalrecluse is home now Posts: 3894 Joined: 2004-08-07 |
![]() Applications written to take advantage of the Itanium's strong points (as with any other cpu) would make the chip useful, I guess it's just a matter of a chip far too specialized to be a mainstream workhorse. Living in Germany now |
Comment
Hydra Performance Junkie Posts: 174 Joined: 2001-03-09 |
![]()
Yeah, I guess you're right. Also check out this very interesting commentary about the future of Itanic: Wither Itanium? Overclocking is a blast! Do I smell something burning? ![]() |
2 pages 1 2