Intel Expands Itanium 2 Family

The company contends that the three newly announced Itanium 2 processors, formerly code-named Madison, are poised to penetrate the data-center space long-dominated by systems based on RISC processors such as Sun's Sparc, IBM's Power 4, and Hewlett-Packard's Alpha and PA-RISC.

Some solution providers concur. "With these processors, you are getting a big boost in speed and higher cache levels," says Joseph Keith, director of business development at ProMicro Systems, a systems builder and Intel partner in San Diego that is introducing an Itanium 2-based server. "We are all waiting for the new compilers to come out from Intel, which will give us an even better processing boost."

Technical Fans
To date, Itanium 2 systems have gained ground in the technical-computing market, where such industries as life sciences and drug discovery have latched onto the chip's vaunted horsepower to drive their computation-intensive projects. The enterprise, however, has been a different story. Corporate IT executives have been less eager to migrate off their installed RISC servers or part with their multiclusters of 32-bit Intel boxes, despite Itanium 2's attractive price performance. However, some solution providers say they are seeing a spike in demand of late, particularly for the latest rollout of Itanium 2s, which sport more cache and better frequency, the ability to run a choice of operating systems beyond Unix, and the potential to fuel much-needed server consolidation.

"I'd say the Madison launch comes a step closer to getting Itanium into the data center," says Gary Melillo, president and CEO of Melillo Computer Consulting, a Somerset, N.J.-based solution provider and premier HP partner who deploys Itanium-based HP systems. "There is still a ways to go, but when you get the ISV support [for Itanium 2], then data centers will be ready."

By ISV support, Melillo means the breadth of applications that must be ported to the Itanium 2 platform in order to jump-start demand for the hardware. It has been a slow process thus far, though Intel and HP (an Itanium co-developer and the primary server vendor backing the chip) claim the developer community is rallying around the platform, including such big guns as PeopleSoft, Microsoft, BEA and SAP.

Intel officials say that most of the leading databases on the market have been ported to Itanium 2, including Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle 9i, and that they expect the database space--as well as some business intelligence and integration applications--to be the big software market for Itanium 2 systems.

"Databases are one of the last bastions of RISC market share," says Jason Waxman, director of enterprise multiprocessor platforms at Intel. "The Itanium 2 lets VARs use Intel architecture to address data-center requirements."

The hallmarks of the Intel architecture revolve around price performance. The new Itaniums come in three flavors: a 1.5-GHz version with 6 MB of Level 3 cache ($4,226); a 1.4-GHz version with 4 MB of Level 3 cache ($2,247); and a 1.3-GHz version with 3 MB of Level 3 cache ($1,338).

According to Gordon Haff, an industry analyst with Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata, the added cache has helped elevate the Itanium 2 processors to performance levels that, on a chip-to-chip basis, beat the competition in the RISC space, with the exception of IBM's Power 4 processor. Now, Haff says, Intel is finally freeing itself from the "Itanium is a poor-performing processor" albatross that has hung around its neck since the debut of the Merced version of the chip several years ago. That early chip, which has since been rearchitected, was widely perceived as a dud.

By extension, shedding that reputation helps hardware stalwarts such as HP. Long on record as the leading systems vendor to fully endorse Itanium, HP last month announced a new family of servers to be based on the latest Itanium 2 processors. The Integrity line, due out in stages later this year, fits into CEO Carly Fiorina's master plan to fully migrate her company from the Alpha and OpenVMS platforms to Intel processors as part of its longer-term strategy. The company is also engaging in a major effort to convince software developers to sign onto Itanium 2.

"HP is in a full-court press to get HP-UX [its Unix OS] applications over to Itanium, and they've been quite effective," Illuminata's Haff says. "And some of the big commercial software is starting to become available, but there hasn't been a large number of sales of Itanium systems for commercial apps to date."

Consolidate, Consolidate
For many solution providers and systems builders, Itanium 2's strongest selling points lie not with performance, but with efficiency: namely, the potential to help customers consolidate myriad servers and to give them the flexibility to go with their operating system of choice. Unlike their RISC-based brethren, Itanium 2 systems can run a variety of operating systems: Linux, Unix and Windows. They can also partition the processor to run different OSes simultaneously on one box. That way, Unix apps and Windows apps need not be housed on separate servers.

HP plans to give customers a choice of OSes on its Integrity servers, a perk that will sit well with IT customers that operate largely heterogeneous computing environments, according to Eileen Gibson, vice president of marketing at Avnet Hall-Mark, a Tempe, Ariz.-based HP partner that plans to sell Integrity systems.

"I can't think of a better way of consolidating an end user's environment than deploying a system that takes care of all your OS needs in one frame," Gibson says. "It's a giant, giant opportunity."

Intel plans to keep investing in Itanium development. Later this year, the company plans to roll out a low-voltage version of the Itanium 2 processor. Code-named Deerfield, it will be aimed at dual-processor systems with lower power consumption, as well as the IA-32 Execution Layer, which is software that boosts the performance of 32-bit applications running on Itanium platforms.

Future versions of Itanium 2, now code-named Madison 9M and Montecito, are also forthcoming. And the company will continue to fortify its 32-bit heritage in the Xeon processor; just last month it announced two new additions to that family.

Of course, there are Itanium 2 naysayers, particularly among the competition. Sun Microsystems officials, for example, contend that the lackluster market penetration of Itanium 2 since its introduction two years ago proves that it is no threat to their Sparc platform.

"Itanium has been one of the biggest failures in the history of computing, except perhaps Microsoft's Bob operating system," says Larry Richardson, vice president of global IS strategy for Sun.