Itanium 2 not yet suitable for workstation push

One of the problems, it appears, is that it's not yet up to speed on CAD applications and HP itself realises that.

MCAD application speed, for example, is still way below regular X86 workstation performance for the Itanium, and while HP engineers hope that the up-coming Madison platform might turn that round, they're just crossing the fingers and hoping, rather than actually knowing.

End users close to Intel's plans in Europe told the INQUIRER today that there's still a lack of software benchmarks for the Itanium at the workstation level, and driver support and full Windows support is still not there.

Indeed, the Pentium 4 in a workstation, particularly in the new chipset configurations Intel is readying, will still likely scorch the hot pants off the Itanic, which still seems to shuffle along after over 10 years of development.

One European end user told the INQUIRER under conditions of anonymity that the Pentium 4 found it hard to catch up even with an AMD Athlon, using ProEngineer, never mind the good old new Itanic 2.

In fairness to HP, it has published MCAD workstation results using the Pentium 4 at spec.org, but the world+dog is still awaiting SPECapc results for the Itanium 2 workstations, it appears.

Perhaps HP had better take another look at its dependence on the Itanium. µ