Paul, I have a few comments.
Re: "In the third quarter--the first full quarter of Itanium sales--manufacturers sold just $13.7 million worth of servers containing the chip, which comes to less than 500 servers, according to market researcher IDC."
Well, at least that's 500 more servers than the AMDroids figured (and 500 more servers than AMD has shipped with Hammer). Dividing $13.7 million by 500 comes out to $27,400 as the average cost per server. These sound like the majority were single CPU.
Re: "By contrast, Gartner research shows that 2,601 Itanium servers were shipped in the third quarter, an increase over the three shipped in the second quarter. The discrepancy between the IDC and Gartner figures apparently comes from the fact that companies have shipped many Itanium servers for demonstration purposes."
Of course 2,600 servers sounds nicer than the previous 500, but I wonder how many of these fit under the category of "demonstration unit" from the OEMs. It's certain that Itanium has ramped very slowly, but I would expect it to pick up once Microsoft launches the full version of their Windows XP 64-bit release, and more of those software commitments we see press releases for actually launch to the public.
Re: "One of the reasons for McKinley's bigger price tag, Krewell said, is that it will cover nearly 440 square millimeters in area--or more than twice that of the Pentium 4."
Yikes! That is large. I wonder what Merced and Cascades are for comparison. No doubt the large amount of L3 cache pays a big difference. Hopefully, the much smaller cell size in Intel's .13u generation makes a big difference with Madison and Deerfield.
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