uname -p output on Itanium machine

[Dianne Womelduff]

Hi -

I am currently supporting several different platform/OS versions
and would like to use uname -p to get the processor type.
This works on Solaris 5.8 and Linux RedHat 2.4.20-18.8, returning sparc
and i686 respectively.
However, running on Linux 2.4.7-10 and Linux 2.4.18-e.25smp, they both
return "unknown"
Here is the output from uname -a

Linux breeze5 2.4.7-10 #1 Thu Sep 6 17:27:27 EDT 2001 i686 unknown

Linux brisk0 2.4.18-e.25smp #1 SMP Thu Feb 6 15:33:05 EST 2003 ia64
unknown

Can you explain why this happens?

Thanks,
Dianne Womelduff