But at some point companies will have to break away from expensive specialized chips and jump to x86, which are less expensive, McCarron said. In the "extreme" long term, Intel and HP could reach some kind of agreement to migrate to x86 servers, McCarron said.

Intel is trying to make it cheaper for system vendors to validate and offer Nehalem-EX chips alongside Itanium through commonality in hardware designs, such as memory and chipset components, McCarron said. Nehalem-EX has also adapted Itanium's RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) features and MCA Recovery error correction feature to reduce data corruption and ensure reliable system performance.

"Itanium provides a gateway to x86 and allows Intel to do direct competition with RISC players in that market," McCarron said.

But such savings could be offset by the expense of porting software to x86, said Jack Gold, principal analyst with J. Gold Associates.

"The hardware is the easy part, porting the software is the hard part," Gold said.