Itanium Will Quickly Spread into Technical Computing Environments
While predictions of the speed and steepness of an adoption curve are always tricky, it's at least more of a science than an art, as there are historical trends to look back upon. HPTC is a market segment that embraces change for the reasons outlined in this chapter, and our goal is to move people working with HPTC from RISC-based system to Itanium-based systems in no more than two to three years.
If you look at Figure 5-3, you'll see that Itanium-based system orders in the HPTC market are predicted to surpass RISC systems in 2003, tracking Itanium availability in midrange and enterprise platforms.
Figure 5-3. Market Sales of RISC versus Itanium Architecture
We're predicting that Intel Itanium processors in the high end of the market will take over from RISC processors as early as 2004. And, of course, the impact in the market doesn't stop there, or even with the 'cascade' effect across the early adopters and early majority. Over time, the same kind of power will cascade down to the level of individual desktop computers. At that point, it gets even more interesting, and the subject of a fair amount of speculation discussed in Part 4 of this book.