Dell changes direction: now will sell Itanium 2 servers

[pm]

Link to story at InformationWeek.com.

It's not absolutely certain (it's not *confirmed* as the saying on here goes) from the quotes, but it does seem to indicate a course change for the company with regards the Itanium 2 product line.

Dell Computer will likely ship specialized servers containing Intel's Itanium 2 processor in coming months, reversing a July decision not to support the chip. Kevin Rollins, Dell's president and chief operating officer, says Intel's second-generation 64-bit processor "will probably start making sense in high-performance clusters. ... We're looking at shorter-term Itanium 2 uses there."

 

[ElFenix]

bah, dell does almost no research on its own and contributes almost nothing to the advancement of the technology. it gets on some of the "committees" that intel leads so that the project looks like an industry movement rather than intel being a monopolistic company (very good strategy on intel's part, keeps the gov't off their backs and lowers their research costs).

oh, and ****CONFRIMED**** means that theres very little basis in reality.

 

[pm]

Well, I spent 4 years of my life working on the design and productization of the Itanium 2 and I was pretty happy about Dell selling Itanium 2 machines. Anything that results in more Itanium 2 users out there makes me happy. (with the thinking that if you are going spend 4 years of your life doing something, then it's nice if it actually has a real-world impact aside from delivering a paycheck every couple of weeks)

 

[Rand]

The overwhelming majority of Dell servers are sold into the low-mid-range server market. Dell's share in the high end "Big Iron' server market is extremely small, and I've never known them to put much effort into changing that.
Personally I'm doubting this will change matters much as the Itanium is aimed precisely at the market where Dell is very small.