Intel Relocates Itanium Engineers to Xeon Projects - Sources

From X-bit Labs: Intel Corp's officially claims that Xeon processors may offer better level of performance and availability than the company's Itanium. According to people with alleged knowledge of the matter, Intel had been specifically reappointing engineers from the Itanium teams into development of Xeon central processing units (CPUs).

"Nearly all the Itanium engineers, save a small development team working on Poulson and then rotating over to Kittson, have been redeployed on Xeon-related projects," said person with knowledge of the situation, who wanted to remain anonymous.

At present Intel is developing new technologies that it could implement into its various servers, including Xeon and Itanium. For many reasons, the latter has a substantial number of advantages over the former.

"Intel does have few more tricks up their sleeve with respect to Itanium, but with Xeon getting stronger and more capable," the person said.

Currently it is unknown whether Intel drops Itanium/IA64 or not. What is understandable is that Xeon/x86 will be moving forward into the mission-critical server segment and that knowledge and talent obtained while designing RISC processors will rather be applied onto Xeon than Itanium.

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