Intel’s last effort to move away from x86 ends with a whimper
Intel has released the final versions of its Itanium RISC processor, the Itanium 9700 series, which are virtually unchanged from the last generation and uses a 5-year-old architecture. There are no new features or capabilities, just the most minor of clock speed bumps.
In a reflection of how old the designs are, they come in four- and eight-core design with hyperthreading for twice the number of threads. Xeons are now coming with up to 22 cores. Clock speeds are 1.7Ghz to 2.66Ghz and the thermal package is 170 watts. A 3.4Ghz Xeon E7 with 22 cores runs at 165 watts.
These things aren’t even remotely competitive, and Intel didn’t really try to address it. The quad core Itanium CPUs get a 133MHz speed bump, while the dual cores get no speed changes.
It’s a sad end to what had been such an ambitious design. But we’ve been here before.
Intel processor history
In the 1980s, Intel launched a massive, ambitious project called IAXP432. It was going to be an epic design, with features that are now standard but way too ambitious 30 years ago: object-oriented memory capabilities, garbage collection, multitasking, and interprocess communication and multiprocessing.
But performance was atrocious, and Intel had put almost all of its eggs in the IAXP432 basket. Fortunately, two young engineers named Pat Gelsinger and John Crawford were working on a side project called the 80386, which would bump the 80286 processor to 32-bits. Gelsinger recalled people telling him 32-bits of addressable memory was ridiculous for PCs.
“People said, ‘What do you mean 32 bits? That’s for minicomputers and mainframes.’ They derided us at the time for being extravagant,” Gelsinger said.
Well, Gelsinger and Crawford pretty much saved Intel. IBM was wedded to the 286 processor, and there were a number of clone makers, such as AMD and Cyrix, taking Intel’s business. Then Compaq jumped on board, and Compaq was the computer company at the time, and the 386 took off, saving Intel.
Itanium started out in the 1990s as a joint effort between HP and Intel and would use HP’s PA-RISC processor as the basis for the project. HP would end up being the only major OEM Intel would score. Sun had its own processor, Sparc, and IBM has Power. DEC, still struggling along at the time, had its own 64-bit processor, the Alpha.
Itanium was also a 64-bit design and Intel’s stated 64-bit strategy. When AMD introduced 64-bit extensions for its Athlon processor in 2003, Intel pooh-poohed the move, saying Itanium was the 64-bit way to go. A few years later, Intel had to quickly reverse course.
Attention turned to Xeons
As Itanium began to sink, Intel started putting more and more effort into high-end Xeons. The E7 line would adopt many mission-critical features and functions from the Itanium, thus taking whatever potential sales HP might have gotten. Since Itanium was meant for mission-critical systems that aren’t replaced as often, the release schedule was longer.
But with each release of Itanium, the gap grew and the level of improvement shrank. It became clear Intel was committed only because there were customers that had made major investments in mission-critical Itanium systems and would not be replacing them any time soon. Legacy support is pretty much the only reason Intel stayed in it this long.
It’s funny how all these efforts to supplant x86 came from higher-end, more powerful processors, when x86’s greatest threat is from below, the ARM processor. Intel fought off all those high-end Unix processors and tried several times to end x86, and a processor made for smartphones and embedded controllers is now its greatest threat.
The Itanic
There is one amusing bit of trivia in all of this. Britain’s notoriously snarky IT publication, The Register, dubbed Itanium “The Itanic,” a reference to the doomed ocean liner. Around that time, chip analyst Nathan Brookwood registered the domain name itanic.com and left it idle. He told me he did it because he suspected some wag would create a site using that domain to ridicule Intel, and he wanted to spare them the annoyance.
Guess he doesn’t need to worry about that any more. Who would bother at this point?
