[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.