The Itanium was announced in 1994 and so it is at least 8 years old. It is still a minor player in the larger processor chip market. The New York Times has a long article on the Itanium entitled Intel's Huge Bet Turns Iffy (free registration required). Gordon Bell (chief architect of the VAX architecture while at DEC) thinks Intel threw too many ideas into the design. Google doesn't want to use it because it consumes too much power:

Eric Schmidt, the computer scientist who is chief executive of Google, told a gathering of chip designers at Stanford last month that the computer world might now be headed in a new direction. In his vision of the future, small and inexpensive processors will act as Lego-style building blocks for a new class of vast data centers, which will increasingly displace the old-style mainframe and server computing of the 1980's and 90's.

It turns out, Dr. Schmidt told the audience, that what matters most to the computer designers at Google is not speed but power — low power, because data centers can consume as much electricity as a city.

If power efficiency does indeed trump processing speed, everything that Intel and Hewlett-Packard have done to pack raw power into the 221 million transistors of the new Itanium 2 could now be a handicap. The chip, which is as large as a silver dollar and whose 130 watts of power dissipation are enough to fry the proverbial egg, is not even a contender in the Google universe. "We're incredibly, incredibly power sensitive, and we've been talking to Intel about that," Dr. Schmidt said.

Wow, 130 Watts is a lot. AMD Athlons up around 60 to 70 watts are awfully hot and slightly hotter than equivalent throughput Intel P4 chips. Intel PIII offers a much nicer ratio of throughput/power and PPC is way lower in power. Anyone know what the power usage will be for AMD's forthcoming Opteron? Or how about for IBM's PPC chip that they are going to do for Apple?