Tony & Intel Investors - Next Tuesday, May 29, ITanium will be formally released.
""It's got some amazing floating point numbers," Krewell said, "so it looks like from a scientific point of view Itanium's going to be reasonably impressive."
"The surprise with Itanium is that even after several years of delays, the floating point performance, at least on some of the benchmarks I've seen, is really outstanding," he said. "It's going to be the fastest floating point chip there is."
For companies conducting business transactions over the Web, Itanium proponents say the chip will prove to be a powerful encryption and decryption tool.
"Such encryption work is typically done by a hardware add-on card today, and they are not very fast," said Jim Carlson, HP's director of marketing for the Itanium program. "It turns out that Itanium could be a four to five times improvement over these dedicated cards." "
Paul
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zdnet.com
All eyes focused on Itanium
By Ken Popovich, eWEEK
May 21, 2001 8:08 AM PT
URL:
After seven years of development and numerous delays, Intel Corp. next Tuesday is expected finally to launch the Itanium, its first 64-bit processor.
The new processor, to be made available at speeds of 800MHz and 733MHz, will not only give Intel access to the high-end workstation and server market, it may also prove a boon for corporate buyers by ultimately increasing competition and spurring lower prices on hardware.
Initial adoption of Itanium-based systems, however, will likely go slowly over the next two years as conservative corporate users evaluate the new processor and applications, analysts say.
"Before they start deploying something that will have an impact on hundreds of users, most large companies will really want to make sure it is shaken down," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst of Insight 64 in Saratoga, Calif.
But patience has always been a virtue for Itanium observers. The chip, known for years by the code name Merced, has been under development since 1994 and delayed time and time again. Originally set for release in 1999, the chip's launch has had to be rescheduled several times.
"It's kind of like sitting around watching a glacier move. It's getting there, but it's going to take time," said Kevin Krewell, an analyst with MicroDesign Resources in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Most recently, Intel planned to release the chip at a high-profile coming out party in October featuring speakers Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp. and Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard Co. Due to an unspecified delay, the San Francisco gathering was instead turned into what Intel called an e-business summit, which just happened to feature a number of Itanium-based systems on display.
Itanium's arrival on the market, coming the day after Memorial Day, is expected to be a more modest event.
"Intel is basically putting the chip out there and providing the benchmarks and the pricing," Brookwood said. "But they expect their OEMs to make most of the noise in terms of their system launches."
Indeed, several major computer makers are expected to announce Itanium-based systems shortly, including Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
RISC at risk?
Currently, the 64-bit market is dominated by proprietary systems from Sun Microsystems Inc., HP and IBM, with each company offering unique hardware built using their own RISC-based 64-bit chips and tied to proprietary operating systems.
By selling proprietary chips tied to specific operating systems and applications, computer makers have been able to lock in customers, enabling them to ultimately charge higher prices.
"All of those RISC-based vendors have charged a tremendous premium because there was no competition," Brookwood said.
For example, once a customer chose to integrate one of those proprietary systems and applications into its infrastructure, he said, it had to rely on that one vendor for future hardware and application needs since other computer makers' hardware was incompatible.
But with several OEMs announcing plans to offer Itanium-based systems, Intel's 64-bit chip should spur greater price competition, analysts say.
"In the future, if you own an Itanium system and have an issue with your vendor, you'll be able to call up Compaq, Dell, IBM or any number of other suppliers and shop around," Brookwood said.
HP will be among the first to deploy new systems featuring the chip. Next Tuesday, it will announce new one-way, two-way, four-way and 16-way Itanium-based servers, and next year it will integrate the chip into its top-of-the-line Superdome server.
Part of the reason for HP's show of support is that it's the co-inventor of the chip. HP technology, known as Explicitly Parallel Instruction set Computing (or EPIC), lies at the heart of Itanium's new architecture.
Floating-point prowess
In technical terms, the Itanium is touted as offering improved predication, speculation, rotating registers and floating point units.
While specific performance benchmarks won't be released until next week, early tests run on Itanium pilot systems indicate the chip's most impressive performance may come on floating-point-intensive applications.
Improved floating-point performance could boost computer-aided engineering and design, fluid dynamics and simulations, and other computer-intensive applications.
"It's got some amazing floating point numbers," Krewell said, "so it looks like from a scientific point of view Itanium's going to be reasonably impressive."
Brookwood agreed.
"The surprise with Itanium is that even after several years of delays, the floating point performance, at least on some of the benchmarks I've seen, is really outstanding," he said. "It's going to be the fastest floating point chip there is."
For companies conducting business transactions over the Web, Itanium proponents say the chip will prove to be a powerful encryption and decryption tool.
"Such encryption work is typically done by a hardware add-on card today, and they are not very fast," said Jim Carlson, HP's director of marketing for the Itanium program. "It turns out that Itanium could be a four to five times improvement over these dedicated cards."
Carlson said that while it will take a while for Itanium to take hold, he has no doubts that Intel's 64-bit chip and its successors will eventually take firm root in the high-end workstation and server market.
"We suspect that for the next year or next two years we'll be in the early adopter phase of what will be a 20-year product life cycle," he said.
Intel is already far along in developing the second-generation Itanium processor, code-named McKinley. The chip, due for release in pilot systems this fall, is expected to operate at twice the speed of the first version of Itanium and ultimately prove to be the more serious challenger to existing 64-bit RISC chips, such as Sun's UltraSparc III and IBM's Power3 and upcoming Power4. |
