As we discussed in-depth in our workstation roadmap, Intel sees e-Business as their target market. Intel wants to provide workstations to businesses, thereby enabling them to increase productivity through Intel's technology. One significant weakness Intel has had in the workstation market is their absence from the enterprise class server market. In other words, they did not, and still do not, make the machines needed to support the workstations they want to sell. Intel's move to IA-64 will finally bring them into that high-end market.
IA-64 is not for every server application. Not everyone running 32-bit server applications needs the added address space that IA-64 will provide. While the Itanium is capable of running IA-32 software in hardware emulation, and indeed x86 compatibility is one of the Itanium's greatest features over the enterprise server competition, the x86 performance will likely not be up to the level of Foster. Foster should provide an easy replacement for the Xeon, increasing performance significantly without requiring a move to a new operating system. Intel expects those who want the benefits of IA-64 now as well as those who expect to want it in the not too distant future, will begin migrating to IA-64 with the Itanium. As Intel moves to newer IA-64 processors, such as McKinley with its 4MB of on-die L3 cache, the performance gains of IA-64 over IA-32 should increase.