itanium competed with low-power systems (primarily 4-cpu and small systems) with servers based on x86 processors, and with high-power such as with ibm's power architecture and sun microsystems' sparc architecture. intel shifted itanium to working with the high-power business and hpc computing, trying to copy x86's successful market (i.e., 1 architecture, many system vendors). the success of the 1st processor version was only with replacing pa-risc in hp systems, alpha in compaq systems and mips in sgi systems, but ibm also made a supercomputer based on this architecture.