TechPulse 360

When launching the latest Xeon server chip, Intel conveniently omitted to talk about its “other” server family, the Itanium.

Probably because Itanium has simply not lived up to the expectation Intel – and others – set forth, almost 15 years ago.

Then Itanium was predicted to dominate the server business, and then trickle down to eventually get into desktops and notebooks. And ultimately replace the X86 architecture altogether, recalls chip analyst Nathan Brookwood.

Well, obviously that didn’t happen and never will even if all of the major server suppliers like H-P, Unisys, Hitachi, NEC, Silicon Graphics – but to the exception of Sun and IBM – have adopted Itanium as their mainframe alternative platform.

“Itanium has become the prefered plaftorm for the also rans in the server business,” quipped Brookwood.

Despite its commercial failure, Intel still wants to hang on to Itanium. And that’s because, Itanium is the only server chip in Intel’s arsenal that can actually compete with the reliability and scalability of its rival RISC-processors like Sun’s SPARC or IBM’s POWER. “[Itanium] is delivering to that very high end mission critical market segment,” explained Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s vice president in charge of the server business.

However, to lower development costs, Intel decided to converge the Itanium platform to the Xeon platform (chipset, QPI’s fast interconnect…). “That will happen when the next generation of the Itanium chip, Tukwila, will launch [probably later this year],” adds Brookwood.

The good news for enterprise customers and the server OEMs like H-P, is that Itanium is not going away. The bad news for Intel, is that it will never be a growth opportunity.

Here’s an excerpt of Brookwood’s comments on Itanium: