Marginal Intel chip sparks war of words

It’s probably not a coincidence that the Itanium was developed in the 1990s by Intel in a partnership with H-P, now one of Oracle’s fiercest rivals, since it bought Sun Microsystems Inc. and hired former H-P CEO Mark Hurd. H-P and Intel worked together in a massive, multi-year effort to create a new chip architecture for servers that would eventually unseat Intel’s own standard x86 architecture. It never happened.

Instead, the Itanium, dubbed by many in the industry as the Itanic, still plods on, but it’s barely noticed. Some investors might not even know what the chip is. Its sales were not broken out in Intel’s most recent financial press release, and it wasn’t mentioned in the last earnings call. The Wall Street Journal noted that in 2010, Intel sold about 125,000 units compared with 14.55 million Xeon chips, its vastly more popular server chip. The Itanium powers high-end servers running the UNIX operating system. wholesale electronics suppliers

And that’s the rub. Oracle, through its purchase of Sun, now owns its own proprietary chip architecture for UNIX-based servers, Sparc. While the future of Sun’s Sparc chip family has also been questioned, Oracle, like Intel, has said it will continue to invest in this legacy technology. Wholesale Cell Phones