Dell drops Intel's Itanium

Dell will now advise customers to buy servers powered by Xeons

Dell admitted today that it is phasing out its line of servers powered by Intel Itanium processors.

The vendor has stopped promoting the servers and will advise customers to buy servers powered by Intel Xeons instead.

The move is a moral blow to Intel but is unlikely to have a big impact on sales, according to Michael Dortch, a principal analyst with the Robert Frances Group. " Nobody ever mentions Dell and Itanium in the same sentence," he said.

Intel's Itanium is designed for high-end systems, but has been largely sidelined by hybrid 32-64 bit processors such as AMD's Opteron and Intel's latest Xeon models.

The Itanium chip has also suffered from a lack of software support and Dell's decision will exacerbate this problem, predicted Dortch, because decreased hardware support will make the platform less attractive for software vendors.

With the industry abandoning the chip, Dortch expects Intel eventually to pull it from its line-up.

"Intel just needs a graceful way for people to migrate off Itanium," he said, adding that few customers using the chip today rely on it for business critical applications. "Itanium isn't dead, but it's definitely on life support."