Research firm IDC has drastically cut its estimates for future sales of Intel’s 64bit Itanium processors. Meanwhile, the Risc processors that Itanium is intended to rival in high-end servers are still being developed.

HP is leading the Itanium charge, accounting for some 80 percent of Itanium systems sold in Europe. Meanwhile, Intel is funding a “buy one get one free” deal, so firms get a free Itanium chip for every one they buy in a server. This seems to be a move to maintain price/performance against stiff competition from IBM’s Power5+ and Sun’s UltraSparc T1, formerly codenamed Niagara. Meanwhile, Intel’s dual-core Itanium, codenamed Montecito, has been delayed again, and is now unlikely to reach customers before August.

So, rather than a single dominant processor line emerging for high-end servers, it looks like competition will continue.

Past predictions for Itanium have been extremely optimistic. At one stage IDC thought that Itanium sales in 2004 would reach $28bn, though in the end they topped out at $1.4bn. Now IDC predicts that sales will reach $6.6bn by 2009 though this time it might be closer, given current demand for the processor.

One of Intel’s problems with Itanium is that, apart from HP, it has really only attracted the interest of the junior high-end server and mainframe vendors. No slight intended, but the likes of NEC, SGI and Unisys are not the first names most IT managers would pencil in on any new systems shopping list. But each of these vendors has its market, which it serves well.

I doubt very much that Unisys makes too much profit on the sale of server hardware. But having its own server line is an added bonus to customers who are interested in the company’s expertise in areas such as finance and insurance systems, plus attendant support and services packaging.

Only HP of the top-tier vendors has opted for Itanium, and it has dispensed with its own Risc architecture processors. Sun and IBM both have ongoing development programmes. Indeed, IBM recently announced it is ploughing ahead with its Power family of processors and development of Power6. A year or so ago some pundits tipped Power6 for the chop.

IBM is going for speed. It offers a quad-core version of the Power5+ processor running at 2.2GHz. The stated aim with Power6 is a speed of up to 5GHz, with power and heat dissipation properties on a par with products from Intel.

Though the market for Power5-based servers declined slightly last year, IBM believes it is making a worthwhile investment, not least because it might take more market share from Sun. It could also give a useful performance boost for existing IBM customers, without any need to change applications.

So, despite Intel’s hopes that Itanium will become the de facto standard for high-end servers, it looks as if platform diversity will continue for some time to come.