Good Ship Itanium
The good ship Itanium is taking on water. The crew has abandoned ship, and the passengers are looking for life jackets.
Perhaps that prose is over inflated, but Itanium numbers show an architecture that is failing in the market in a fashion so spectacular that even hardened tech vets like myself are aghast.
Gartner recently published figures showing the number of Itanium servers shipped 
(and I’ll note here that “shipped” and “sold” are two entirely different things). In 2003, a mere 26,000 Itanium servers were shipped. IDC estimates just under a million Linux servers alone were shipped that same year. So, ignoring the UNIX market segment for a moment, Itanium is commanding 2% of the server market – at best.
This gloomy news must be offset by sales vs. shipments. Many “shipped” server end up at vendor demo centers, are loaned for evaluation to customers, or become permanent residents at publication testing labs.
SGI may hang on for a bit, as their top-end High Performance Computing (HPC) systems rely on Itanium. But as Opteron and EMT-64 continue to scale, with multi-core releases and faster interconnects, we can expect to see NEC, Unisys and Fujitsu to fall quickly away. It is a weak market sustained by two vendors, one of them clearly the dominant consumer of the chip.
And while I am looking at these numbers, I notice the profound absence of IBM, who created one of the earlier Itanium servers, and who recently has been rumored to be killing off the line. If they were selling less than Unisys - less than 1% of the market - then they had to bail. That’s performance worse than their PC line.
So let’s have a moment of premature silence for the Good Ship Itanium as her stern points proudly to the sky.
