Itanium Introduction - Itanium2
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The original Itanium came online in mid 2001, and was grossly misunderstood by many. Quite a few analysts decried it's horrid x86 performance (which was just for show, since Itanium was never meant to run that archaic stuff), its cost, and questioned its purpose. That first "Merced" chip was just a beta for the upcoming Itanium2. The sole purpose was to get out in a few workstations, let people get used to coding/compiling for it, and figure out where it needed improvement for the "McKinley" replacement. Intel was aware there weren't going to be any big sales for that first chip. But a few test runs told them that while the floating point performance was excellent, the integer performance needed a kick in the pants, and the bandwidth between the processor, the L3 cache, and the RAM itself was a choke point.
Itanium2 (McKinley), otherwise known as the "real deal" came out a year later. Its sales were still not huge, but it was certainly a welcome addition to "big tin" users, giving them another option besides SUN. Realistically, there are only so many earthquake simulators being built every year, and the cost has to this point been prohibitive, to the point of bringing it down to single and dual processor systems.
With the "Madison" core revision (374mm square in 6MB L3 cache form, and 410 million transistors) and a die shrink to 0.13 micron, there now are more "low voltage" options (called "Deerfield") however, with a wider range of cache sizes to boot. Coming soon is "Montecito", which adds dual cores to the picture, as well as yet another die shrink.
Intel is working towards bringing cost equality between their high end Xeon and low end Itanium2 products. But for now, Xeon makes its larger sibling look like a small fry when it comes to sales. In 2003 alone, Intel reported 100,000 Itanium2 processor sales. Xeons, by comparison, sold in excess of 6 million units. To be honest, they are currently very different markets, even with the new Xeon's adding 64 bit support.
What about Opteron? While that is certainly going to be a problem for Xenon eventually, AMD isn't going to compete in the same ballpark as Itanium. Why? Because it’s not likely that someone like the Bank of Montreal will be buying a 72 processor system powered by Opterons -- large portion of the market for IA-64 is pretty safe. In fact, Intel just made a rather large score, thanks to NASA. At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), it was announced that those two, as well as SGI would be working to make a monster with a total of 10,000 processors. That friends, is a huge design win. In one fell swoop, they sold over an entire months worth of production at last years pace.
Next: The Itanic Rises >>
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