"Our expectation is Itanium will be healthy for us based on software" and services, Davis said.

Still, Itanium has been less successful than Intel originally hoped, with only a few vendors such as Hewlett-Packard selling Itanium-based servers.

Last week Intel pushed back the release of the next version of Itanium, code-named Tukwila, to early next year. It said it wanted to speed the performance of highly threaded workloads.

Including the error correction feature in Nehalem EX marks a shift in Intel's strategy, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. Intel tried to keep Xeon confined to the lower end of the market and wanted customers to buy Itanium for mainframe-type applications. By equipping Xeon chips with higher-end features, Intel is pushing Xeon up into that market, Brookwood said.

However, customers running legacy applications or who need very high levels of availability, such as stock markets and banks, may continue to buy Itanium systems, he said.