Dell has not yet seen enough interest in Itanium 2 architecture to launch products based on it.

Customer interest in Intel’s Itanium 2 architecture is yet to reach a high enough pitch to prompt Dell Computer Corp to launch products based around the 64 bit processor, chairman and CEO Michael Dell said last week.

During an analysts’ call to discuss the firm’s fourth quarter results, Mr Dell described the market for Itanium products as quite small.

Mr Dell said he saw the initial demand for Itanium 2-based products coming from the high-end clustering market. He said that if customers wanted absolute best performance, Itanium was appropriate, however in terms of price performance 32 bit processors were currently the best option.

The company did launch a product based on the first Itanium processor, but Dell’s website shows no current Itanium 2-based offerings. We’re going to be in Itanium, said Dell, right about the time we think it’s going too be a reasonable volume market.

A spokesman for Dell said it began seeing some interest in Itanium-based clusters from customers at the end of last year. However, the company has yet to disclose any plans for Itanium 2-based products.

Dell’s take on the market was questioned by archrival Hewlett Packard. Brian Cox, worldwide product line manager for HP servers, agreed with Dell that high-end clustering was the most fertile market for initial Itanium 2 deployments. However, he said that HP was already shipping thousands of Itanium 2-based machines into that space.

HP is seeing demand from customers such as universities, government labs, energy companies and automotive design shops. It is also seeing demand for Itanium-based workstations. More to the point, Cox said, These are profitable revenue shipments that are going out.

HP is also seeing interest from the commercial sector as well, which is likely to increase with the expected launch of Microsoft’s 64 bit version of Windows 2003 this spring. Given Dell’s business model, the launch of a mature Microsoft operating system for Itanium may be the trigger it is waiting for.

You can download a free report at www.dmfreereports.com