One of the most embarrassing images I’ve ever seen is the Wikipedia graph, at the URL below, which shows Intel’s predictions (plural!) for sales of its Itanium processor family.

My nostalgiameter pinged this weekend because 2007 was forecast by Intel to be the year the Itanium processor codenamed Tukwila started shipping, replacing Montvale.

As you’ll have noticed, the optimism has somewhat dissipated. The best guess for Tukwila silicon is now “sometime in 2009” and it was announced recently that Montvale will be “shipping by end 2007” to a horrified silence by pundits.

So I dug out the Intel predictions, just to see. Wikipedia’s first graph shows $5bn in Itanium sales by the year 2000, based on the heady promise of merging Intel and HP research into very long instruction words. By 2002, both HP and Intel expected sales of $35bn at least.

Revisionism was swift to set in, however. By 2002, reality had hit home and the new prediction suggested that the $5bn breakthrough wouldn’t be reached until 2005.
If you look at the image, the red line shows reality: big sales didn’t start till 2003.

And even as late as 2006, when this survey cuts off, Intel hadn’t got halfway to the $5bn mark.