Keep in mind, also, that the liklihood of uniprocessor Itanium systems will be very small. I imagine DP will be the smallest config available, and multiprocessor performance on Itanium is supposed to scale far better than x86. I guess I got distracted, I thought I put the link in. Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts.
Life is good.
I have seen a demo comparing an Itanium 667MHz system with a Sun 450 USII system. I think both had four processors. Something both chips have in common. I'm not sure which takes the title for most delayed. Or for the cost of a server with 4 Itanium servers inside it, you could buy a much cheaper solution and stick 4 nCipher nForce 400 SCSI cards on it for 1600 transactions per second.