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Intel Corp. along with HP and a number of server builders announced plans to spend $10 billion in the remainder of the decade to support the growing eco-system for Intel Itanium processors. The move comes a year after HP transferred its Itanium development lab to Intel and vowed to spend $3 billion on Itanium popularization from late 2004 till late 2007.

“Itanium has been taking share from both IBM power and Sun Sparc. We’re on the right trajectory, but we want to go faster,” said Tom Kilroy, general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group, at a press conference.

The $10 billion investment will include Intel’s work on research and development, improvements of the server platforms by appropriate makers, development of programs as well as compilers for the Itanium architecture as well as marketing.

The funding will be provided by founders of the Itanium Solutions alliance, which are Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, HP, Intel, NEC, SGI and Unisys. It is unclear how much each company is going to invest.

The Itanium processors were designed to outperform all the other server chips, including x86, Power and Sparc. However, the new architecture faced numerous delays and performance-vise was not impressive from the start. But while Dell and IBM ceased making Itanium-based machines, 70 of the Fortune 100 corporations utilizing or planning Itanium solutions deployments, Intel says.

A global organization, the Itanium Solutions Alliance was founded in September, 2005 with a mission to accelerate Itanium solution deployments. The Alliance offers a suite of developer enabling programs including Developer Days, a Solutions Center Network and the recently launched Itanium Solutions Catalog, the first public listing of software applications available on Itanium platforms.

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Comments currently: 6
Discussion started: 01/27/06 07:17:35 AM
Latest comment: 01/28/06 11:28:13 AM
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[1-4]

1. 
This article is not visible in you home page! I could only see it when i was reading yesterday's news
[Posted by: jonup | Date: 01/27/06 07:17:35 AM]

2. 
Well, certainly the Itanium is a very successful chip since it is in 70 of 100 Fortune 100 companies, and is continuing to gain market share.

Except, how many of these machines are there actually installed in these Fortune 100 companies? One techie wants to try one out in a small LAN he is using, and this would qualify. I know, I've often been in that situation, so this is not in the least bit revealing.

Hmmm, gaining market share. How hard is it to gain market share when you start from essentially zero? How can they not gain market share?

I truly hope the Itanium beats x86, as I think x86 is horrible and needs to die, but Intel is spreading misinformation when it comes to the popularity of this processor. It's original intent was to replace x86 and herald in the age of 64-bit processing, now it is just a high end server processor that isn't even too successful in the niche market is relegated too. Despite have a much better cache system compared to the lowly Opteron, it still can't beat it in integer performance. Although cache isn't quite as important to the Opteron, it would still be scary to see the integer performance of it, if it were equipped with a suitable cache system on the level of the incredible cache arrangement of the Itanium 2 (obviously the Itanium 2 cache would not be ideal for the Opteron, I am just saying something that extravagant that was).

Itanium may have a future, but the present and past have not been nearly as impressive as people had anticipated. Floating point is nice, but if this processor can't show a superiority in integer performance over x86 (which becomes particularly difficult with Conroe/Merom coming out), how can it ever be successful? Integer will always be more important in sales than floating point. Always has been, always will be. They missed the mark when they created a floating point monster that isn't, up to this point, very good at integer. Hopefully in the future it will be.
[Posted by: TA152H | Date: 01/27/06 09:35:35 AM]

3. 
As a practical matter I dont see Itanium killing off x86 ever. X86 has bad parts to it, but x86-64 has done alot to stream line x86. It has also remvoed alot of the lagacy bits and requierments, added the registers, and over all made it siginificantly better than it was.

Itanium has its own negatives as well, not the least of which is its complexity. I dont see replacing x86-64 with Itanium as improving the situation any.

If you want to replace x86-64, then youll have to do it with an architecture that is significantly better, with little to no drawback, and have it run x86 rather well in order to allow some kind of transition. Again, I just dont see Itanium even comming close to these requierments.

Indirectly, if there was to be some kind of new architecture to replace x86, it sure would be nice to have it as somekind of open standard that other chip companies can use. If Itanium were to replace x86, it sure would cut out all the competition in the market, including AMD, unless Intel licesed it to them, or was forced to by anti monopoly law.
[Posted by: The_Starfox | Date: 01/27/06 08:16:53 PM]
+ expand thread (1 answer)

4. 
The weird thing is that RISC doesnt seem to be the magic bullet either hehe. I mean I suppose it does all come down to the implementation in the micro architecture. Even still, some RISC processors have decoders in the pipeline. An example being the G5, which incidentally has turned out to be quite the power hog, and not the dramatic speed demon that it was initially thought to be.

If x86 is so horrible, it shouldnt be able to compete with the other far "superior", and yet it does. It is still very competative in performace, and power consumption.

Im not saying x86 is awsome, but I am saying that its not as bad as some seem to think it is. Besides no worthy replacement has come along yet.

[Posted by: The_Starfox | Date: 01/28/06 08:11:32 AM]
+ expand thread (1 answer)

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