[Info-vax] Itanium in the news (NOT)

[Marc Van Dyck]

After serious thinking Richard B. Gilbert wrote :
> Neil Rieck wrote:
>> LINUX SOFTWARE HOUSE Red Hat has decided that there is not enough
>> interest in Intel's Itanium processor to keep supporting it.
>> 
>> The next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will be Itanium free
>> and while Red Hat is not the only Linux it will be a bit of a morale
>> blow for Intel.
>> 
>> The Itanium is Intel's 64-bit enterprise chip, which we've long called
>> the Itanic, and it is not exactly a best seller for Red Hat.
>> 
>> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1566977/red-hat-drop-itanic
>> 
>> NSR
>
> Maybe the Itanic is sinking?  As a number of people argued it would?

The number of Linux installations on Itanium must be marginal at best.
Who in his right mind would want to run that on a piece of iron that is
at least twice as expensive as a standard intel processor system with
the same power (and not even taking into account the vendor lock-in) ?
As far as I know, Red Hat stopped years ago to maintain the Alpha
distribution, and noone on earth ever complained. Why should Itanium
be any different ? For me this is not much more than a non-event. 
People
buy Itanium systems to run OpenVMS or Unix, full stop. And I'm very
surprised to hear that the windows kit for Itanium hasn't met the same
fate yet.

-- 
Marc Van Dyck