Evidently Intel's press agents had anticipated the question and decided - since denial was kinda futile - to make a clean breast of it. Naturally Intel reassured folks that Itanium was still meeting its long-term goals whatever they might still be.

Last November, when it was already apparent the Itanium wouldn't be a mainstream chip and was being increasingly consigned to the 8p-16p niche, Intel, quoting IDC projections, said 100,000 units would ship this year and 300,000 next year.

Guess not.

There are now 20 systems on the market with eight or more Itaniums in them and 70 two-way or four-way servers. Compared to a year ago, Itanium revenues derived from large servers have reportedly been doubling or tripling and are up tenfold for machines with 16 or more processors.

The current 64-bit mainstream candidate is the Xeon with 64-bit extensions that Intel copied from AMD and was forced to announce to offset the AMD64's visibility, aka the EM64T. According to Talwalkar, the EM64T created "noise and confusion," but only cost the Itanium "a few months with the general audience."