Dan3: Intel really looks like they've screwed the pooch on their server strategy. For the coming years, Itanium's positioning results in it being far too low in volume to allow any significant economies of scale - in either software or hardware.
Yes and no. It's clearly wrong to compare Itanium to Hammer. They are two completely different products, aimed at vastly different market segments. I, at least, haven't seen any indications that any of the upcoming Hammer versions will have the RAS features necessary for the primary Itanium market segment (Sun and Power4 systems).
The big problem is in the workstation area. Intel is also aiming Itanium at this portion, but I just don't see how it can compete with P4 Xeon and Hammer.
Oh, and 64bit really isn't that big an issue here yet. Take a look at the high-end workstations sold today. Dell's most expensive series of workstations still has 128MB RAM as the default (of course, I doubt anyone actually buys one with this amount, but still). Upgrading to 4GB costs just under $6k.
Same goes for HP. Their highest-memory (preconfigured) offering is:
HP Workstation x4000 with the Intel Xeon processor at 2.4GHz, Windows 2000 Professional, NVIDIA Quadro4 900 XGL high- end 3D graphics, 1GB PC800 RDRAM, 36GB Ultra 160 SCSI hard drive, 48X CD-ROM, keyboard, mouse, power cord and recovery media.
Even their high-end Itanium workstations only ship with 2GB memory (although you can upgrade at less than 50% of the cost (per GB) of Dell memory upgrades):
bstore.hp.com
bstore.hp.com
By the time the 4GB memory barrier really becomes a major issue in workstations, Intel will have 64bit extensions to P4. In the mean time, they can still cover some of the high-end-we-really-need-more-than-4GB workstation market with Itanium.
-fyo |
