Still, there won't be lot of Itanium computers to choose from. A series of glitches have pushed back the chip from mid-1999 until now, and that's on top of a fairly long development period. Consequently, most companies are now concentrating on building computers for McKinley, a second, more powerful version of Itanium, which will start appearing in pilot projects at the end of the year. Every vendor's plans have changed considerably. It makes a lot more sense to shift development and focus to McKinley.
Software applications are also limited.
Product selection, therefore, will be comparatively limited. Compaq, for instance, will come out with Itanium servers this year, according to sources at that company, but hold off on workstations until 2002. Despite the relatively limited introduction, the Itanium presence will grow as the year goes on. At that point, HP will primarily be marketing one server family, and the main decision for the customer will be which operating system to select. The company's Itanium Intellistation will contain two 800MHz Itaniums with 2MB of cache, up to 16GB of memory and an 18.2GB or 36.2GB hard drive.