Dell Says: Bye Bye Itanium

Dell decided to conclude its relationship with Intel's Itanium processor. The information was confirmed Thursday by an Intel spokesperson, but Dell was not available for comment.

Dell had earlier been a major backer of Itanium but has decided to focus on chip designs "that have a lot of customer momentum behind them," said Paul Gottsegen, vice president of worldwide marketing at Dell, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Itanium was originally conceived as a mainstream processor with the potential to replace Intel's mainstay Pentium. Over time, the target market for the sophisticated Itanium processor shifted to high end servers and supercomputers, where Dell is not a player.

According to the research firm IDC, Itanium computers were originally supposed to ring up $15 billion in sales this year, but the forecast has been reduced to $2.5 billion

"Dell was never a big Itanium customer, said Erica Fields, an Intel spokesperson. "We've got a host of [server vendors] that sell Itanium. Dell was one of them, but frankly, their impact on sales has been negligible," she said.

HP is the main customer for Itanium processor and earlier this year the company has chosen Itanium to upgrade Integrity NonStop servers. HP Integrity NonStop server is capable of scaling up from two Itanium processors to 4,000 Itanium processors.

Intel and several high profile partners, including Microsoft, Oracle and HP, are expected to announce a consortium late this month designed to further promote and develop the market for Itanium systems.