IBM had to release its Itanium product soon, given the plans it announced last week to sell some servers using AMD's Opteron processor, Kastner said. "IBM had to have a strong Intel 32-bit and 64-bit product line in order not to confuse customers into thinking that there's some unannounced transition to AMD in the cards," Kastner said. And IBM's Itanium support trails that of rival Hewlett-Packard, "which is betting the company on Itanium," he added. IBM had expected to put x450 on sale "early next year", but shipping the product earlier would have had limited success given that Big Blue expects most of the servers to use Windows. Microsoft only last week released Windows Server 2003, the first Microsoft operating system to support Itanium. Prices for the x450 begin at $25,999, or about £16,640, for a single-processor model, but IBM expects most customers to pay about $38,000 for a setup that includes two 1GHz Itanium 2 processors, each with 3MB of high-speed cache memory. IBM for a time sold a server using the first member of the Itanium family -- the "Merced" product that arrived late and performed poorly. But that system was geared not for real-world use but for developers who wanted to begin the process of rebuilding their software for the new chip, Advani said. Intel's Itanium debut has been hampered by the fact that the processors can't effectively run the older software written for computers with Intel Pentium or Xeon chips. Intel is trying to address the issue with new software that lets the Itanium emulate the other chips. IBM waited until this stage to release its Itanium server because not enough software was available, Advani said. "Our customers told us early on that hardware without accompanying software is nothing more than a heater," Advani said.
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