Borrowed from Ted on AMD thread:
Intel Customers, Engineers Tweak Itanium Systems in `Plugfest'
Las Vegas, Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Intel Corp. engineers and their computer-making counterparts usually spend their time holed up in Silicon Valley development labs, busily tuning the wizardry behind the newest, fastest computer chips.
Now, they've set up a massive shop -- a 34,000-square-foot village in one huge room at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas -- to see the fruits of their latest labor, the high-powered server-computer processor dubbed Itanium.
With three miles of cable, more than 100 20-Amp power lines and enough digital-storage space to hold 2,000 feature-length films, the company's so-called ``plugfest'' gives software and hardware makers a place to test and tweak new products based on the Itanium chip. Dell Computer Corp., Microsoft Corp., 3Com Corp. and others have devices, components and operating systems there to evaluate how well the gear performs together.
It's the No. 1 chipmaker's second such gathering. The fledgling products are reaching maturity, more than six months after the original festival in the less exotic setting of Tigard, Oregon, proved basic concepts like what systems and parts worked in the first place. This week's event should give insight into what configurations run the best.
``They've proven to be a very good mechanism for making very, very rapid progress,'' said Ron Curry, Intel's marketing director for Itanium.
The plugfest isn't open to the public, and companies have their own mini-office spaces set up with fiber-optic and copper- based Internet access for private get-togethers. Developers go from one spot to another testing their wares.
Intel has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on getting these systems ready for pilot production during the fourth quarter and large-scale commercial sales in the first half of next year. The chipmaker has already shipped almost 30,000 Itaniums for use in more than 6,000 prototype servers and workstations.
The Las Vegas gathering represents the culmination of that effort -- Intel's way of making sure that Itanium is a safe gamble for the company and its partners.
Sep/14/2000 0:56 ET
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