Whats the future of the Itanium chip?
Itanium is showing success in the high end, not in the mid-range. So we’re focusing product development, marketing, and software efforts on greater than four-way systems. For a while, we had ambitions to drive it down to two-way servers and workstations. It just doesn’t work in terms of the economics of the low end of the industry. Long term, the architecture Itanium needs to aim at is [IBM’s] Power line. We have nothing in our existing 32-bit line capability that can compete with Power. It’s a very high performance line requiring liquid-cooling capabilities. The mainframe isn’t dead. That’s where I’d like to push Itanium over time. Q: What are you doing in China? A: China is our second-largest country market today. And it’s the second-largest country market for computers in the world today. It’s on a path to pass the U.S. this decade. So as a single-market opportunity, it’s enormous. You have to have a presence. We have got factory infrastructure there, R&D facilities, and large-scale
