Come the day Itanium is really released, Linux will be the first operating system up and running on it, and you ll be able to scale Itanium SMPs up to 64 processors. That ensures that only one processor, instead of a gaggle of them, is listening for network traffic on one socket. Linux 2.4 has much better memory support, as well. Even 32-bit Intel processors running Linux 2.4 can address up to 64GB of memory.
Some technical goodies are still absent.
But that s a minor detail. First, you need to educate decision makers about Linux and open source. Too many senior IT folks still think of open source as this scary thing that may come back and bite them with licensing problems. Next, Linux value-added distributors and ISVs need to stick to open source and the Linux Standard Base. If Linux starts forking, it s back to the Unix wars of the last two decades, and the only winner there was Microsoft.