Of all the hardware OEMs, only HP went into Itanium with both feet.
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The company has also struggled broadening the base for its Itanium high-end server chip (See "Intel Kicks Off Overhaul").
One 32-chip Itanium system would be capable of 290, 000 MTOPS, more than twice as many as the new level allows.
And new software from Microsoft and the blazing Itanium chip from Intel should ignite a technology buying cycle by November.
And, more recently and most painfully for HP, Oracle announced withdrawal from further application development for Itanium in March 2011.
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The company hopes to sell the open source Itanium product to such demanding customers as financial services and telecommunications firms.
AMD, is that Intel has to use software to make Itanium compatible with 32-bit programs, but this slows down the processor.
Intel, which has dedicated 64-bit silicon in Itanium, de-emphasizes the processor's 32-bit performance, according to Nathan Brookwood, and analyst with Insight 64.
Red Hat has also said that it is ending support for Itanium.
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By comparison, Intel's Itanium 2 server processor tops out at 1.66 GHz.
While both Opteron and Itanium ran newer 64-bit software, AMD's chip was also backward-compatible, enabling it to run software written for older 32-bit processors.
Unisys, which makes high-power computer systems for banks and credit card companies, is already anticipating a hassle with export authorities when Intel's Itanium chip debuts later this year.
Top candidates include its memory chip business, its Itanium server chips and several smaller businesses based around other categories of computer components for functions like storage and networking.
From that time onward, Itanium was a humiliation, the butt of industry jokes and a source of embarrassment to the analyst firms that predicted a large market for it.
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While HP and Intel continue to invest in Itanium, Microsoft, notably, announced that it was ending Itanium support after its latest versions of Windows Server and SQL Server.
FORBES: While HP And Oracle Sully Cloaks, IBM Takes Their Customers
The new company is betting heavily on a next-generation Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people) chip, the Itanium, which is expected to arrive in 2004.
AMD's chief operating officer and heir-apparent to Mr Sanders, claims that his chip beats Itanium by running 32-bit applications without such software trickery, thanks to a more modern design.
Until then, it will be stuck selling machines that run its old versions of Unix, with questionable ability to switch the systems over to the new Itanium technology when it arrives.
The two companies were building the Itanium chip, an expensive, energy-intensive processor that cost billions to develop, gained few customers, offered middling performance and was shuttled to the sidelines.
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Analysts said it was cheaper, faster and guzzled less power than anything else on the market, including Intel's muscular Itanium chip, which debuted in 2001 but never lived up to expectations.
The basic argument was that HP insisted that Oracle had agreed to port and support Oracle products on Itanium servers for as long as, well, as long as HP wanted.
The company's flash memory unit hasn't posted an operating profit since before 2004, and it continues to devote billions of dollars toward its Itanium chip, which never lived up to original hopes.
"It has a little bit of an Itanium feeling to it, " AMD's director of stream computing Patricia Harrell says, referring to an Intel processor design that has fallen well short of its early expectations.
This was the architecture that eventually became Itanium.
FORBES: Question of the Day: Why Does HP Continue to Screw Up?
It is the economic argument in favour of running Windows 2000 on Intel's Itanium early next year that undoubtedly poses a threat to Sun at the bottom and the middle bits of its server range.
In addition, Fujitsu (otc: FJTSY - news - people ) has designed its own chip set working with the Intel processor to raise performance and reliability for both 32-bit and 64-bit computing, Itanium's specialty.
The company must now put its energy into ensuring that Intel 's (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) Itanium chip architecture, upon which HP has partly staked its future, is a big success.
Intel was the leading proponent of Itanium.
FORBES: Question of the Day: Why Does HP Continue to Screw Up?
Oracle says HP is phasing it out and that Oracle is therefore planning to drop support for Itanium, while HP says it has no such plans and will attempt to force Oracle to continue its support for the chip.
Having been caught out by the Internet-stoked demand for web and application servers as well as the very late arrival of Windows 2000 and Intel's Itanium chip, both have recently produced high-end servers that have outscored Sun's in benchmark tests.
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