Dell Quietly Drops Itanium Support

Dell, which never had its heart in Itanium, is dropping out of the game. The company will not develop or buy the chipset technology necessary to support the next Itanium version, code-name Montecito. This leaves HP and a handful of Japanese companies holding the proverbial Itanium bag. Intel, which is in a real back-alley brawl with AMD for X86/X64 server market share, is at the point where they aren't pushing Itanium down the market chain anymore.

Dell's sweet spot is 2- and 4-way Xeon servers, which the company pumps out like hotcakes. With the impending delivery of Intel of dual-core Xeon chips in the next six months, Dell can easily introduce an 8-core system -- plenty of horsepower for most enterprise applications today.

With a year or two of experience under its belt in scale-out architecture in cooperation with partners Oracle and SAP, Dell's answer to an empty Itanium cupboard is "we can support thousands of SAP users on our scale-out 4-way Poweredge 6850 servers. What's your real need?" A Dell Itanium rack has fallen in the forest. Nobody heard and nobody cares.