Vendors line up behind Itanium

When Intel rolls out the third generation of its Itanium processor as expected today, it will be greeted by growing vendor momentum behind 64-bit computing, but enterprise customers are still on the fence when it comes to bringing in the more powerful machines to support key applications and networks.

The launch of the latest version of Itanium 2, code-named Madison, comes with widespread vendor support, a marked change from earlier Itanium releases, when HP and Unisys were the primary companies to roll out products using the 64-bit Intel chip. This time Dell will announce an Itanium 2-based product, and IBM, which waited nearly a year before rolling out a server based on Intel's second-generation Itanium chip (code-named McKinley), will have two new servers running the Madison processor.

The chip will come in three versions: a 1.5-GHz processor with 6M bytes of cache, a 1.4-GHz processor with 4M bytes of cache, and a 1.3-GHz chip with 3M bytes of cache. The earlier Itanium processors ran to speeds of 1GHz with 3M bytes of cache.

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When Intel rolls out the third generation of its Itanium processor as expected today, it will be greeted by growing vendor momentum behind 64-bit computing, but enterprise customers are still on the fence when it comes to bringing in the more powerful machines to support key applications and networks.

The launch of the latest version of Itanium 2, code-named Madison, comes with widespread vendor support, a marked change from earlier Itanium releases, when HP and Unisys were the primary companies to roll out products using the 64-bit Intel chip. This time Dell will announce an Itanium 2-based product, and IBM, which waited nearly a year before rolling out a server based on Intel's second-generation Itanium chip (code-named McKinley), will have two new servers running the Madison processor.

The chip will come in three versions: a 1.5-GHz processor with 6M bytes of cache, a 1.4-GHz processor with 4M bytes of cache, and a 1.3-GHz chip with 3M bytes of cache. The earlier Itanium processors ran to speeds of 1GHz with 3M bytes of cache.

Faster-processing 64-bit systems historically have been used by the high-performance computing community, which needs the speeds and the expanded memory to handle heavy-duty number crunching. But businesses also are beginning to look at 64-bit capabilities to run business-intelligence applications, for example, or to handle ever-expanding ERP deployments.

"This is the first time we'll see an architecture that's capable enough to start to get equal interest not just on technical computing, where McKinley got it, but also as a general-purpose platform in the 64-bit space," says Brad Day, a vice president at Forrester Research.

Already, software vendors have been working with beta versions of the Madison chip to port applications over to the new platform. "It's a good indication that the winds are starting to move in [Itanium's] direction," Day says.

Application support ultimately will be the key in determining how Itanium 2-based systems fare, analysts say.

"Madison is really the first systems architecture that we believe can start to be competitive against Unix RISC alternatives," Day says. "What needs to evolve is the breadth of horizontal applications on this platform, as well as applications that are vertically based."

Major software vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP support Itanium 2, but expanding the software portfolio for Itanium 2 still has a long way to go, he says. About 100 software vendors support Itanium 2, whereas about 15,000 applications are optimized for Unix RISC.