Intel Corp. along with HP and a number of server builders announced plans to spend $10 billion in the remainder of the decade to support the growing eco-system for Intel Itanium processors. The move comes a year after HP transferred its Itanium development lab to Intel and vowed to spend $3 billion on Itanium popularization from late 2004 till late 2007.

“Itanium has been taking share from both IBM power and Sun Sparc. We’re on the right trajectory, but we want to go faster,” said Tom Kilroy, general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group, at a press conference.

The $10 billion investment will include Intel’s work on research and development, improvements of the server platforms by appropriate makers, development of programs as well as compilers for the Itanium architecture as well as marketing.

The funding will be provided by founders of the Itanium Solutions alliance, which are Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, HP, Intel, NEC, SGI and Unisys. It is unclear how much each company is going to invest.

The Itanium processors were designed to outperform all the other server chips, including x86, Power and Sparc. However, the new architecture faced numerous delays and performance-vise was not impressive from the start. But while Dell and IBM ceased making Itanium-based machines, 70 of the Fortune 100 corporations utilizing or planning Itanium solutions deployments, Intel says.

A global organization, the Itanium Solutions Alliance was founded in September, 2005 with a mission to accelerate Itanium solution deployments. The Alliance offers a suite of developer enabling programs including Developer Days, a Solutions Center Network and the recently launched Itanium Solutions Catalog, the first public listing of software applications available on Itanium platforms.