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To: Jim McMannis who wrote (52858)	8/28/2001 7:40:30 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Respond to of 275872

Jim, you've missed the point. 1. Isn't the P4 reliable? Jim, try not to bring up a desktop processor when we are talking about the enterprise segment. It really gives you a perception you're not looking for. These processors will be fine in not crashing your home computer, and they will work fine as low cost front ends. But the big difference is that they haven't been validated for high end applications on high end platforms. The old validation axiom says, "If it hasn't been tested, it doesn't work". That's good enough for the businesses that have to put up big bucks to get their systems online. In many ways, Itanium is a marketing machine to convince the world that Intel has a solution to go up against Sun's perceived superiority. Businesses will trust Itanium, even if it weren't any more reliable than Pentium 4. But the fact is that the Itanium itself does have certain built in reliability features like the Machine Check Architecture. More on this later. 2. OK...can't the same be said for P4 Xeon? No. Xeon does not have MCA built in. This is a set of registers and features that will become invaluable to IT departments, and it stands to really separate Itanium from the commodity IA-32 market. Intel actually demoed this today at IDF. I will try to find a link later. 3. P4 can't outscale itanium? Otellini says P4 will go to 10 Ghz. Current iTanium burns about 125W..will shrinks help enough? Not frequency scalability, Jim. I'm talking about platform scalability, such as the ability to get a number of microprocessors to work together in a system without incurring bottlenecks. The Xeon has never been especially good at this. The current large cache Xeon is still limited to the 100MHz bus of the Pentium III. The newer Xeon will have the 400MHz front side bus of the Pentium 4. But neither of these compares to the 6.4GB/s of bandwidth that McKinley offers, plus the extensive platforms available for it to scale to very large systems. Intel's IA-32 line has only been able to scale past 8-way by using clustering. Itanium will be able to do this without clustering. 4. support for itanium? OEMs? Where's the buyers? Patience, Jim. Itanium has only just been released last quarter, and the first version of IA-64 Windows has been released today. OEMs are still building infrastructure, and that takes time. Next year, there won't be huge volumes, but there will probably be a positive NPV for Intel. By 2005, I have heard that IA-64 will become the majority player for the high end market. At least Compaq intends to use IA-64 exclusively by 2004. Others can't be far behind. 5. After 8 years of development the Itanium scales to 800 Mhz...you think they would have figured it out by now... Bah! You are confusing the development of a new computer architecture with the development with a computer micro-architecture like the Pentium 4. IA-32 CPUs can be turned out with in a much shorter time due to the architecture already being established. Intel has undertaken an extreme step with Itanium, and they have finally been successful in launching it. I think that McKinley being released next year is a positive sign that Intel has many more revisions of the architecture in the pipeline. You can expect exponential grown in performance to begin with, as Intel is able to implement many tricks that never made the first cut. It will probably continue to grow on a normal scale, once the first few iterations are launched. By that time, it will have appropriately distanced itself from the competition. wanna_bmw