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Hewlett-Packard is to discontinue Itanium-based workstations in favor of AMD's Opteron and Intel's Xeon processors, but denies there will be any change to server ranges based on the high end chip.
HP co-developed the high end Itanium processor with Intel and was once one of its biggest proponents. Analysts predicted Itanium's days were numbered since HP began selling Opteron servers earlier this year. HP maintains that the decision to discontinue Itanium workstations will have no impact on the company's high end Integrity line of servers.
The move still comes as a blow to Intel, since HP makes up an estimated 50% of the Itanium market. HP will continue to provide support for the Itanium workstations until 2009.
"In working with and listening to our high performance workstation partners and customers, we have become aware that the focus in this arena is being driven toward 64-bit extension technology," an HP spokeswoman said. "The decision to discontinue HP's Itanium workstation investment is limited to the workstation market and has no impact on HP's success with Itanium-based servers."
Itanium 2 chips came in the zx2000 and zx6000 workstations. HP discontinued the workstations on September 1 and will stop shipping new systems on October 31.
"The workstation market has never been the main focus for Itanium," an Intel representative said. "Itanium continues to make inroads in the high end server market."
COPYRIGHT 2004 Rethink Research Associates
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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