WHITHER ITANIUM ?
After several years and billions of dollars Itanium has begun to ship. This is the biggest gamble made by Intel. If it succeeds it will do to the high end, big iron mainframe space, what the x86 did to the low end and mid region computing. Another analogy could be the first IBM 360. It received a lot of criticism for being late, but laid the solid foundation for the IBM hegemony.
Today the hardware performance looks good, but is not compelling. For comparison the Digital Alpha in its hey day had excellent performance, but that did not prevent the slide of Digital into oblivion. But there are important differences, and Intel does indeed have a high chance of success.
A. PERFORMANCE: The follow on product McKinley looks a lot better. The longer pipelines improves the clock rate, and the on chip cache improves performance even further. And the shrinks , Madison Deerfield etc, enhance the performance even more. But the important issue is how will the performance of the successors of Merced compare with the contemporaneous competing hardware platforms i.e. the follow on to UltraSparc, Alpha, etc. Developing a new processor chip is getting to be expensive. Once the Itanium makes a few inroads, a lot of competing vendors may not be able to afford the cost of staying on the performance treadmill, and may drop out of the processor business.
B. COST: The Itanium platform promises the economy of scale a la x86. Everyone and their brother is building an Itanium platform ! Once it gets cheap, the virtuous cycle begins by increasing the market share giving rise to even greater economy of scale and thus increasing market share even further..
C. SOFTWARE : However cheap the platform, it will not sell without the proper software. Software vendors do not write software unless they see an adequate ROI. They prefer to write software for high volume platforms, but volumes may not take off unless the software is there. A classic chicken and egg situation ! How can this deadlock be resolved.
(a) HP has committed its future platforms to the Itanium. So all HP applications will port to the Itanium. The software vendor will definitely see a minimum number of platforms equivalent to the HP market share.
(b) Killer applications have ignited several computing platforms taking them to the critical mass of platform sales, which makes the other software vendors to jump on to the bandwagon. The VisiCalc sparked the Apple II, the Lotus 123 ignited the IBM PC, and the Macintosh languished until Excel showed up. What will be the Killer App for Itanium ? Intel is stressing the floating point performance and the speed of encryption , and apparently Intel hopes that web servers will be the Killer Application.
(c) Hardware Emulation of x86 and PA-RISC obviously helps the Software vendor. The entire Software may not have to be redone. Several Software Modules could be left in x86 or PA-RISC native code. Apple successfully migrated from 68000 to RISC scheme by the slow software emulation.
(d) Intel has had a $250million fund dedicated for seeding companies which will develop software for the Itanium. We shall see if these companies do come up with several Killer Apps or provide the software needed to reach the critical volumes needed.
(e) Itanium will have multiple operating systems: Windows 64, Linux, HP Unix and IBM Unix. This can cause confusion, because the software developer will not know which platform to write the application for ! Hopefully one binary object code will work across several Operating Systems, and only a setting flag or a dll will have to be changed for different operating systems. If this can indeed be done the platform will look very attractive to a software developer, because the available market will be multiplied several fold.
Intel appears to have done the right things so far. The hype was necessary to get the Software Developers attention, but has also caused greater embarrassment about its publicized delays. Well , the IBM 360 had similar problems, but still achieved its objectives. We will all have to wait and see if Intel's gamble will indeed pay off. |
