Itanium in the shadows

While the Intel Solutions Alliance Community – an Itanium 2 vendor coalition that includes Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics and Fujitsu Ltd. – had a booth on the showcase floor and a banner hung in the Moscone Center asking, “Why RISC it?”, the noise coming from news of Intel’s upcoming chipsets drowned out its high-end chip.

For the desktop, Intel said Conroe processors will be available in the second half of 2006 as part of Intel’s Professional Business Platform, codenamed Averill.

It also announced three new processors for servers and workstations for this year, including the new Xeon-based platform, codenamed Bensley, which will be updated with the new Woodcrest processor by the third quarter of 2006.

Developers also got a first-hand look at Intel’s quad-core chip, codenamed Clovertown, which was running the keynote’s PowerPoint presentation. Clovertown is compatible with the Bensley platform and is slated for 2007.

Intel Solutions Alliance recently announced it will invest $10 billion over the next four years to improve Itanium’s features and functions and bolster its market position.

More recently, the CEOs of Intel, HP and Oracle announced further collaboration on Itanium, including a $1 billion pledge over the next five years on Integrity hardware.

Pat Gelsinger, senior vice-president and general manager of the Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, said Itanium currently supports over 6,000 applications — a number that has doubled in the last 12 months.

“We’ve seen this translate into revenue growth to over $2.5 billion in systems revenue,” said Gelsinger, adding that growth will continue as Intel releases the next generation of its Itanium, Montecito, in Q2 of 2006.

Despite these numbers, Intel’s and HP’s explicitly parallel instruction computing (EPIC) platform customer base is far less than that of the RISC vendors (IBM and Sun). At last year’s spring IDF, Intel said Montecito would be released in late 2005.

Montecito will be Itanium’s first dual core chip and will deliver 2.5 times the performance of its predecessor at one quarter of the power, according to Intel. The chipmaker has also delayed the release of Montecito’s update, Montvale, from 2006 to 2007 and pushed back Tukwila from 2008 to 2009. Poulson, Intel’s sequel to Tukwila, is due out by the end of the decade.

Itanium often misses release dates, whereas its Xeon chipset meets or is released ahead of schedule, according to a report by analyst firm Clabby Analytics. It said Itanium is getting hammered by AMD Inc.’s hybrid 32-64-bit microprocessors.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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