Sure it represents a fair amount of money being spent on Itanium, but it's money those companies would have spent anyway. HP is the real key. It has the lion's share of the Itanium market, and, not that this is going to happen, but if HP walked away from the Itanium, Intel would stop development on it the next day.

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There is an IBM Power5 upgrade coming as well.

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It's a very good processor for that purpose.

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