What's to become of Intel's Itanium processor now that even supercomputer heavyweights like Cray are turning to the Xeon?

Cray apparently has its heart set on the upcoming 45 nm Nehelem processors due out later this year, most likely to take advantage of the QuickPath interconnect and all the parallel processing benefits that go with it. The company is already using AMD Opterons outfitted with that company's HypterTransport interconnect.

Cray is gunning to break the teraflop barrier and is struggling to keep up with cluster technology. But if the Xeon is a suitable platform for everything from low-end blades to the highest-end HPC machines, it's hard to see the Itaniums finding a suitable niche anywhere.