Intel finally launches new Itanium

by Scott Bicheno on 9 February 2010, 10:35

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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Roadmap

Skaugen was keen to point out how big the Itanium market has become, adding to the slide below with the estimate that the total market for AMD's Opteron processors in 2008 was $4 billion - so Itanium is bigger.

 

 

 

He was also keen to talk about the Itanium roadmap, implying the next generations - Poulson and Kittson - would follow Intel's tick-tock cadence and arrive at two year intervals. Furthermore, with Tukwila still using the 65 nm manufacturing process (the latest PC chips use the 32 nm process), Poulson will go straight to 32nm without even pausing at 45nm.

 

 

The Intel Itanium processor 9300 series costs from $946 to $3,838 in quantities of 1,000, with the first OEM systems expected to ship within three months.

 


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Posted by b0redom - Tue 09 Feb 2010 10:55
Does anyone use Itanium in practice? I don't think I've seen it deployed at any of my customer's sites.
Posted by kingpotnoodle - Tue 09 Feb 2010 12:56
b0redom
Does anyone use Itanium in practice? I don't think I've seen it deployed at any of my customer's sites.

Not for your average company that needs some application & web servers.

It's used on high performance UNIX systems mostly I think, science & big number crunching applications.
Posted by scaryjim - Tue 09 Feb 2010 13:04
b0redom
Does anyone use Itanium in practice? I don't think I've seen it deployed at any of my customer's sites.
Given that the slides claim $5bn of Itanium server revenue in 2008, someone must.

If I was part of the Itanium development team, I'd be very worried that RISC and mainframe server share has dwindled from $30bn and 60% share, to $27bn (including itanium) and < 50% share. Don't be fooled by the fact that they've coloured the Itanium slice of the pie blue: they're very firmly in the orange slice that's losing ground to x86-based server platforms.
Posted by badass - Tue 09 Feb 2010 13:09
scaryjim
Given that the slides claim $5bn of Itanium server revenue in 2008, someone must.

If I was part of the Itanium development team, I'd be very worried that RISC and mainframe server share has dwindled from $30bn and 60% share, to $27bn (including itanium) and < 50% share. Don't be fooled by the fact that they've coloured the Itanium slice of the pie blue: they're very firmly in the orange slice that's losing ground to x86-based server platforms.

And they'll lose more when they release Nehalem-EX!
Posted by Syllopsium - Tue 09 Feb 2010 14:14
For existing Itanium customers this new upgrade is a no brainer. OK, so a new compiler and motherboard unlocks the full potential, but it should be a relatively cost effective improvement.

Can't say I know anyone using it myself, but then again I don't need to do (or know anyone that does need) serious number crunching. The Itanium's got great floating point performance, and some decent virtualisation and protection features. Beyond that, I'm not sure it's got much going for it..