Nonetheless, demand remains fairly uncertain. Compaq Computer executives, for instance, have said that companies will spend most of 2002 trying to popularise Itanium, with volume sales beginning in 2003 and 2004, when the successors to McKinley, called Madison and Deerfield, arrive. ServerWorks, which manufactures chipsets for Intel servers, said it likely won't come out with Itanium-compatible parts until Deerfield. "We're just waiting for volume to materialise," said Kimball Brown, vice president of business development at ServerWorks. A major stumbling block for Itanium has been a lack of applications. The chip is built around an entirely new architecture, which goes by the acronym EPIC, that requires brand-new software. Itanium chips can actually run standard Windows programs; the chip includes an integrated Pentium chip. Performance, however, is not very good, according to most analysts and computer experts. Although many new Itanium applications are expected to arrive with McKinley, the software available will be dwarfed by the number of servers with standard Intel chips. Software developers also don't have the dollars to invest in Itanium programs right now. Customer interest for Itanium servers is "effectively zero", Joe Marengi, senior vice president of Dell Americas, said in an interview in November at Comdex. "The investment involved in the transition is huge." At the time, Marengi suggested that one could argue the relative merits of a hypothetical 32-64 bit chip. Few companies have ever successfully switched from one architecture to another. Intel, in fact, attempted to switch from its "x86" architecture, the architecture behind its microprocessors, in the early '80s. Many of the company's best designers were put on the Sierra project, a chip based around a budding new architecture that would succeed the 286 chip, according to Brookwood. In the end, however, the company went with its plan B, an extension of the 286 called the 386. Pat Gelsinger, one of the leaders on the 386 project, has since become Intel's chief technology officer. Ironically, Intel contemplated doing a 32-64 bit chip in the early '90s, according to former company executives, but decided to concentrate on chips based around the then-emerging EPIC architecture.
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