HP has announced plans for new eight- and 16-way Itanium servers that will ship later this year. The forthcoming models will flesh out HP's Integrity range of Itanium systems, which currently comprises high-end 64-processor Superdome servers and low-end single- and dual-processor systems.

The news follows the launch last week of low-power-consumption Itanium chips designed for rack-mounted server systems.

Sales of Itanium systems are still very low compared with alternative architectures, however, and analysts said this gap is likely to remain for many years to come.

Andy Butler, vice president of analyst firm Gartner Group, presented his firm's projections for the server market at an HP event in Grenoble last week. "It's extremely unlikely that the Itanium chips will have displaced Intel's 32bit chips by 2008. Intel's 32bit chips are very strong in the server marketplace," he said. However, Butler was more optimistic about the Itanium's chances of displacing other Risc architectures, such as HP's own PA-Risc and Alpha offerings.

Butler predicted that sales of Intel's 32bit server chips will continue to grow until at least 2008. "In 2008 the IA-32 growth will be a relatively small percentage compared with IA-64 growth, but that is because IA-64 is starting from zero." Butler predicted that IA-64 would represent 20 percent of the market for Intel Architecture (IA) chips in 2008. He said the market share of Sparc chips will stay flat, and over the next two or three years IA-64 growth will be mainly in the Unix sector.

"Few Windows administrators want 64bit technology," he said. "Firms should base their buying decisions on price and performance." HP also announced details of several new systems built with Intel's latest Itanium 2 chips. A new single-processor system features Intel's latest low-power 1GHz Itanium. HP previously offered a similar Itanium workstation built with earlier versions of the Itanium chip.

The new zx2000 is designed for clustering and technical computing applications such as 3D simulation and geological mapping. It can be fitted with a maximum 8GB of RAM, and has bandwidth-to-memory of 4.3GB/s, almost double that of Pentium 4-based systems.