Here's the key paragraph from last week's Forbes report by Chris Kraeuter headed Intel Kicks Off Its Overhaul
Otellini and Bryant didn't indicate which business units would get the most scrutiny, but a likely candidate would be the group working on the company's Itanium chip. Used in high-end servers, the chip continues to garner billions of dollars of investments annually from the company and from partners such as Hewlett-Packard but it hasn't met expectations. Part of the problem is the cumbersome software baggage that comes with the chip.
Hear anybody at HP saying "oops!"? Me neither, but for every dollar Intel takes out of the Itanium development budget somebody else, i.e. HP, is going to have to put more than one in -because contract development always costs more than in-house development if the same people and corporate resources are used for the same purposes.
HP, unlike Sun, took Wall Street's advice: abandoned its proprietary PA-RISC architecture in favor of "industry standards," and laid off most of its intellectual and engineering resources in one cost cutting wave after another.
So how's Wall Street's advice working out for them? Well, the cost cuters are in charge, most of their operations are on life support -and that industry standard thing? well, I guess they're up the market without a CPU.
Sun, meanwhile, doesn't exactly get rave reviews on Wall street, but has its first low power, SMP on a chip, SPARC products on the market and is well positioned to to be one of two surviving players, with IBM/Cell, in the general computing market.
To which all I can say is: "way to go loonivitch" (et al)!