However, Otellini said that Itanium last year grew faster than the processors it competes with, including the Sparc and Power chips. He didn't cite any numbers to back up this claim.

The development of Itanium chips has also been plagued with problems. Intel earlier this year delayed the release of Tukwila, it's next-generation Itanium processor, to the middle of this year. The release was delayed to add new technologies like support for DDR3 memory. The last Itanium chip, code-named Montecito, was released in 2006.