Chapter 5. The Itanium Adoption Curve
“Commercial customers accept new technology when it's 'proven to be proven'. High performance technical computing is the way to prove out to this market segment that it's time to move into a new world of performance.”
—from HP Presentation on Technical Computing
In this Chapter:
Traditionally, there's been a 'cascade' effect whenever a new microprocessor architecture is introduced in the computing world. We've seen time and again that releasing a new product that promises a forward leap in term of performance will be eagerly seized upon by the users with the most critical problems to solve. From there it's only a short time before the adoption spreads into other areas. This spread increases exponentially as more and more user segments come into the fold, starting as a trickle and then into a cascading flood of adoption.
Similarly, where Itanium®[14]-based systems are first used in the market depends on how central the dual needs of performance and the need to use a wide range of applications are to the solving a company's problems. We have already seen a rapid adoption by the technical market segments where the performance need is most critical and many of the application vendors have already embraced the architecture.
[14] Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks or trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
The widespread adoption of Itanium-based platform in the main commercial segments will quickly follow suit as it is proven to be the best architecture by the most demanding early users. Continued success of additional members of the Intel® Itanium® processor family® is sure to follow, as the chip series is designed to anticipate and support the ever-increasing demands for computation in the age of the Internet.