Intel spent nearly 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop Itanium, but the first version of the chip has faced slow sales so far.
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.
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.