The Intel Itanium is tottering towards death, analyst reckons
A report from senior analyst Jon Peddie suggests that Intel's 64
bit flagship microprocessor, the Itanium, is dead in the water.
So is it a turkey?  In his latest musings, Peddie, the CEO of
Jon Peddie Research, said that the "Itanium is trying to sneak
out the back door."  He said that when he was at the annual
Supercomputing conference in Portland, there were no Itanium
related announcements.  He said: "Even SGI, a former Itanium
BFF, introduced its latest brainchild, the Altix Ultraviolet
(UV), which is based on Nehalem EX processors."  It scales to
2,048 processors and can be built to an astonishing 262,144
CPUs.  Said Peddie: "SGI assures us that there is no change in
the relationship between SGI and Intel re:Itanium - they'll use
them if Intel builds them but..."  Intel, he continued, is
positioning Larrabee as a multicore CPU that is capable of
parallel processing and scalar processing.  AMD and Nvidia were
both at the Supercomputing confe