Product selection, therefore, will be limited. Compaq, for instance, will come out with Itanium servers this year, according to sources at that company, but hold off on workstations until 2002.
HP will come out with two servers, a 4-processor server developed in co-operation with Intel and is proceeding with a similar co-development project with NEC to build a 16-way box.
IBM is expected to offer a single 2-processor workstation and one 4-processor server. IBM's Itanium Intellistation will contain two 800MHz Itaniums with 2M of cache, up to 16G of memory and an 18.2G or 36.2G hard drive. IBM's Itanium server, by contrast, will contain 4 processors with and 32G of memory.
Interest in the new Itanium systems is likely to be limited during the early stages of its inception.
"Initially the systems will be brought by software developers who want to adapt applications for IA-64, or as a test platform for migrating to it" said David Booth, Australian national systems marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard.
"The 64-bit platform will really hit its stride next year," said Rudd.
Despite the relatively limited introduction, the Itanium presence will grow as the year goes on. At the end of 2002, HP will start putting Itanium into "Superdome," its 32-processor RISC machine. Superdome pricing starts at a lofty US$1 million.
Eventually, Hewlett-Packard's Intel-based server line and the server line containing its PA-RISC chip will merge. At that point, Hewlett-Packard will be primarily marketing one server family and the main decision for the customer will be which operating system to select.
The size of the memory banks and the huge performance boost they offer remains one of the key features of Itanium systems. "You can load up all of the Web pages on a site and never go to disk," said Bretzmann.
Intel declined to comment on the specifics of the launch, but executives are clearly relieved the chip is finally coming out.
"This is the quarter many of us have waited five or six years for," said Paul Otellini, general manager of the Intel Architecture Group.
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