From profiterol to profit
The Itanic may have sunk a long time ago for Intel, but according to new evidence, the ill-fated Itanium chip seems to be resurrecting itself a bit, even starting to finally pull in a profit.
According to the New York Times, former head of Intel's server chip business, Pat Gelsinger, said the Itanium business was "now profitable," some ten years and ten billion dollars of investment down the line.
Gelsinger, who recently left the Intel to become president of EMC's infrastructure products group admitted the oft mocked Itanium had been "a challenge," but he said it had finally clawed its way into the black during Gelsinger's final few months at the firm.
Not that a few months of profitability is about to make up for the decade of hurt Intel suffered from its little server chip that couldn't.
It all started back in 1999, when Intel and HP teamed up in the hopes of taking the server chip industry by storm, planning to blow rivals like IBM, Sun and Compaq out of the water, and perhaps even to bring the chip into mainstream PCs and notebooks too.
But alas, Intel learned the hard way that Itanium wasn't just a chip on its shoulder, it was also a significant dent in its wallet, as developers shunned the buggy, delayed new architecture, and firms failed to adopt it.
In a bid to keep the chip on life support, however, Intel, HP, Unisys, Silicon Graphics, Fujitsu and several others infused the project with a further $10 billion in 2006, to be spread over four years.
Sadly, some firms cracked under the strain and fell by the wayside, like Silicon Graphics which went bust after switching to Itanium and canning its own chips. But at least HP continued to believe, taking a whopping 90 per cent stake in Intel's Itanium sales.
HPs unconditional love sauce appears to have finally paid off for Itanium so, whereas the chip will probably never really swim, at least it seems to be done sinking.
