Itanic Road Map to Xeon
If you look at the Itanic roadmap it's easy to figure out where it will change to Xeon.
Madison - 2003 pretty good chip, but few customers moved from PA-RISC
Montecito - 2006, three years later, finally dual core, huge cache, customers that have to stay on HP-UX finally start moving. Meaningless Linux or Windows sales or sales outside of HP.
Montvale - The Halloween chip. 4% higher GHz and you can't even put the faster FSB chips in HP highend systems. The only reason this chip was not canceled was to try to get the market to think the Itanic has 5 more years. All Itanic systems today are end of life in 2013 according to HP
Tukwila - 2009 in systems. Quad core and finally 65nm. Wish Intel would not be such a laggard in chip fab technology. Expect the cores to have significantly less performance per core than Montvale which will make software costs prohibitively expensive.
==> Xeon
Poulson - There is no commitment...just future which allows it to never happen.
Xeon will be available in 64 socket systems by this time, so there is no need for Itanic. Expect HP to provide emulation software on Xeon to support HP-UX. Similar to how Itanium supports x86 now that they took that out of the itanic chip. HP will move their install base to a real commodity processor.
Kittson - it is a cute name on a processor chart but other than saying it could be the 9th itanic chip it is just a name.
Cheers..as it is late.