Who actually uses Itanium based computers?

[wozname]

I always see the Itanium version for any programmer tool I download from microsoft.

However it seems that Microsoft only provides Windows Server 2008 for it, which is not cheap.

Why would anyone use it, considering the considerable disadvantages of price and 32 bit performance?

[protomyth]

No one running an Itanium cares about 32-bit code. I have mostly seen them in HP shops that converted from PA-RISC.

[wozname]

That makes sense, However there must be some killer feature that makes them superior to the x64 architecture. Could it be memory architecture? Power efficiency? How would you explain to a PHB the advantages it gives you over x64?

[protomyth]

Well, running HP/UX seems to be a big advantage (read: converting costs money/time and messes up the monitoring infrastructure).

[wozname]

Fair enough :)

[protomyth]

Sorry, I think that probably came off as more snippy than I would have liked. The legacy thing is pretty important. It is the only real upgrade path for HP/UX (or for that matter OpenVMS). So, most of the decision is based on conversion and upgrade paths. It has turned into a big iron processor like SPARC and POWER. You can certainly put a lot of them in a machine and people spent money building the systems, but I am not sure what a salesman would tell me the advantage is.

[wozname]

Cheers, thanks for the clarification.