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Intel To Talk Servers At Developer Forum
(02/25/01, 4:57 p.m. ET) By Mark Hachman, TechWeb News
At its developer conference this week in San Jose, Calif., Intel Corp. is expected to once again assist its customers with a shift to its new 64-bit architecture, Itanium.
Intel (stock: INTC) will host customers, developers, analysts, and media at the Intel Developer Forum, a three-day event that is expected to focus less on Intel's traditional PC microprocessor business and more on the higher-margin world of servers and enterprise computing.
"Whereas IDF has been predominantly about desktop content, 50 percent [of] this year's [presentations] will be server content," said Mike Fister, vice-president and general manager of the Enterprise Platforms Group within Intel. "That's indicative of both the status of servers and e-business within Intel."
At the show, Intel is expected to encourage customers to talk freely of their own shift from the 32-bit architectures used in the Pentium III and 4 to the new architecture Itanium.
Companies will demonstrate the Infiniband I/O silicon in action, sources said, and ServerWorks Inc. should begin talking about 2- and 4-way chipsets for Foster, the forthcoming server processor based upon the Pentium 4's NetBurst bus.
Observers also expect Intel to counter the HyperTransport announcement made by archrival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (stock: AMD).
In its simplest form, AMD's HyperTransport was developed as a point-to-point chipset connection to allow the company to expand into servers. Intel's complementary Hub Architecture may also be opened up for licensing, sources said.
But analysts hope to glean significant clues about Intel's future in the server business by listening to Intel's microprocessor announcements.
According to Fister, Intel will "imminently" announce a 900-MHz Pentium III Xeon with 2 Mbytes of on-chip cache, and confirm that Foster will launch during the second quarter.
A 700-MHz low-voltage mobile Pentium III will also be announced, an Intel spokeswoman confirmed.
Intel executives have also scheduled briefings to again explain their memory strategy, and analysts hope to gain a better understanding of how the Pentium 4 will be tied to synchronous memory using the Brookdale chipset
Finally, Intel, Santa Clara, Calif., will issue a "platform launch"—code for volume availability-of the Itanium 64-bit processor "in the next few months, in the first half of 2001, just like we said," Fister said.
But that also depends on when the question was asked. Analysts noted that the Itanium had been projected to ship in volume as early as late 1999.
"Merced," as the first iteration is known, has sampled in a so-called pilot release to 120 worldwide customers, among them Wells Fargo Bank and the Mayo Clinic.
Details of the next-generation Itanium processor, McKinley, will also be discussed. Intel executives have said previously that they expect McKinley to have twice the performance of the 64-bit Merced chip.
The issue, for customers, will be what applications demand the 64-bit power of the Merced and McKinley chips, and which will be satisfied with the cheaper Foster chip, whose performance is expected to be close to the Merced.
For some, the transition will be a no-brainer; 32-bit applications are currently limited to 4 Gbytes of memory address space, and high-end applications will want more, said Nathan Brookwood, analyst with Insight64 in Saratoga, Calif.
"Folks who need a bigger address space will be drawn to Itanium," Brookwood said. "If they can live effectively within the 32-bit address space, they'll stay with Xeon. It's less work."
Hewlett-Packard Co. (stock: HWP), the co-designer of the Merced chip, will release an undisclosed number of products specifically for Itanium, said John Miller, director of product marketing for Unix servers at HP, Palo Alto, Calif.
However, some number of its existing products will also be convertible to Intel's 64-bit chips-but only McKinley, not Merced.
"On one hand, it's helped us," Miller said of the shifting Itanium schedule. "As you know, developing changes around a new architecture is a big task for a big company. It's a double-edged sword: You have to prepare and be ready for a strong transition plan for customers.
"On the flip side, its a constant challenge—I wouldn't say struggle—to reassess and reevaluate our plans," Miller continued.
In earlier presentations, Intel executives had hotly denied charges that Itanium was simply a development vehicle, not an actual revenue-generating product.
"Itanium's kind of like the Pentium Pro processor," Fister said of Intel's first foray into the server space. "McKinley may be analogous to the Pentium II. It's logical to assume there'll be more volume on McKinley than on Itanium."
But one analyst wonders if Foster will be the dark horse in the race.
"I would like to see McKinley and Foster information," said Peter Glaskowsky, analyst with MicroDesign Resources Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. "We need to see if McKinley will overtake the Foster processor in real server applications.
"Foster will almost be better than Merced," Glaskowsky added. "If McKinley can't overtake Foster, [Intel] will have a real problem."
If that happens, revenue from Intel's 64-bit products could be pushed out until as late as 2004, meaning "Intel would have devoted 10 years of R&D without any return on its investment," Glaskowsky said. |
