IDC appears to suffering from some confusion concerning the future of Intel's Itanium processor.

According to an Intel spokesman, citing someone called 'Bozman', the research agency has predicted that a staggering 25,000 servers based on the Itanium processor will ship this year.

That's very good news for Intel and no doubt represents a very significant increase in sales of the 64-bit chip.

But what's this? An IDC press release from last December predicts... er... "2003 will be a good year for Linux, Wireless LANs and Messaging, but not for Itanium" [our italics].

Hardly a thumbs-up - especially for a platform expected to sell in the tens of thousands.

The release includes the prediction: "Adoption of 64-bit computing will be slow, and vendor-driven. IDC does not expect to see full 64-bit use in commercial applications until later in the decade."

In addition, "64-bit computing will face ongoing challenges in 2003".

The IDC release, dated 23 December 2002, can be read here.

Where does The Register stand on this one? Why, we're behind IDC all the way... ®