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Intel Pushes Itanium 2 Lineup into Mainstream

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 08/23/2004 | 02:53 AM ]

Intel Corp. Monday cut the prices of Intel Itanium 2 processors aimed at high-end mission-critical servers and workstations. The price change along with forthcoming introduction of new Itanium 2 chips from Intel will allow the company to offer a broader lineup of IA64 processors in the short-term, but does it all impact the long-term?

Table of contents:

• Itanium 2 Lowers Price, Expands Market Presence
  
• Itanium 2 Systems Still Expensive
  
• Let the Customers Choose: Xeon or Itanium 2?
  
• Xeon, Itanium, Opteron, PowerPC Drive the Same Direction
  
• Transition to IA64 Still Years Away
  

Itanium 2 Lowers Price, Expands Market Presence

Intel’s move to decrease IA64 pricing is pretty noteworthy, as the world’s largest maker of microprocessors has so far preferred to withdraw its Itanium 2 products from the price list in favour of more advanced SKUs selling at the same price, rather than to reduce pricing on existing offerings. With introduction of the new Itanium 2 processors known as Madison 9M and Fanwood later during the year the lineup of IA64 architecture-based chips will be much broader than earlier.

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The Itanium 2 Monday’s price drop was pretty aggressive – the processors lowered their price by 12% - 32%, which is a very tangible dive even for desktop chips.

Itanium 2 wafer, picture by Intel Corp.

Intel today supplies 7 flavours of the Itanium 2 processors, up from 2 versions of the Itanium chips back in mid-2001. In addition to the number of Itanium 2 iterations offered to the market, Intel has also broadened the price-range of its IA64 chips: the Itanium 2 now cost from $503 to $4227 in business quantities allowing both affordable workstations as well as high-end servers.