Can HP's 'Super' server save Itanium?

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reduced the Itanium-Xeon overlap. Previously, HP developed its own chipset for eight-processor Xeon machines, but the company now develops only four-processor Xeon servers.

High-end servers, used for essential tasks such as tracking company inventory and orders, are a choice market. The machines typically are used for years, and securing a place at the heart of a customer's network can lead to sales of storage equipment, services and lower-end servers.

Machines with dozens of processors and hundreds of gigabytes of memory are rarely used to tackle a single problem, though. More often they're split into independent partitions that handle separate jobs.

"Today, most of these are carved up," Cox said.

The upgrade option
Existing Superdome customers will be able to upgrade to the Arches components without getting rid of the system chassis, Cox said. That could be helpful, given that a full-size Superdome is about the size of two refrigerators.

However, as with the upgrade from Yosemite to Pinnacles, customers will have so swap out not just the electronics boards that house the processors, but also the communications back-plane that links those boards together, Cox said.

Upgrading to Montvale, a faster successor to Montecito due in 2006, will only require processor boards to be changed, Cox said.

After that comes the Tukwila processor in 2007 and its successor, Poulson, but HP can't commit that existing Superdome customers will be able to upgrade to those processors.

HP Itanium and Superdome Road map

This article does not speak to the bandwidth or BUS
Architecture speeds between chips and memory, Nor, and of
even more relevance, the underlying support for an OS which in
design should be tightly coupled with the machine code
instruction set to add any business value. Is HP going to
support HP/UX, and r LPAR's with all of this horse power under
the hood? Or, will HP continue to waffle between Microsoft,
Linux and HP/UX with no clear direction other than INTEL speeds
and feeds and impressive processor names? So what good are
64 of these bad boys running in a single box if I can not
provision all of this into a consolidated "adaptive" system for an
Enterprise?

On the ground here in the Silicon Valley, we see Opteron as the
chip of choice in the egineering community (Linux) as a whole.
This portends that AMD has the right stuff for the next wave of
killer business apps. It seems to me that when you are talkng
speeds and feeds, you have to include the versatility of the
underlying OS/architecture to have a meaningful discussion. So,
in short, what is the actual point of this Itanium architecture? Is
it relevant? Probably not.

HP Itanium and Superdome Road map

Later this year HP will disclose specific bus b/w and speeds on the enhanced new chipset codenamed Arches which will go into our highend Superdome server and our midrange servers, as well. We will continue the OS support we have had to date of HP-UX, Linux and Windows, plus extend support to these midrange and highend systems for OpenVMS (which is already running on our entry class 1-4p Itanium based Integrity servers). Supporting multiple operating systems is not waffling, but an embrace of reality where virtually every data center on the planet runs a heterogeneous mix of operating systems.

Hardware based partitions (BTW, not available from IBM) are already supported (thus we have been Adaptive Enterprise capabilities for quite some time) and software based partitions will be soon supported on the Integrity servers.

I'm also based in Silicon Valley and see what goes on in running businesses here. HP warmly supports Opteron in our ProLiant servers (we ship more than anyone, including Sun and IBM) as well as Itanium in our Integrity servers. Each has different application sweet spots. ProLiant servers are tops in price/performance in 1-4p configs and used most frequently in edge of network computing, email/groupware infrastructure, EDA, and smaller line of business applications/databases. Integrity servers are best in raw performance for the most demanding line of business applications such as ERP, floating point HPC, highly scalable datawarehouses and databases. Between ProLiant and Integrity servers HP can cover any workload that customers have. They are a nice complement to each other.

[fred dunn]

HEY HP....ITANIC IS OVER, MOVE ON!

When are you going to stop wasting your resources? If you are waiting for Intel to tell you that it's just not working out, don't. Take a lesson from Intels past, they continue to push products even when they are not wanted or needed. Why? Becasuse they have not listened to their consumers and have research expenditures that need to be recovered. And who is going wind up paying for those expenditures, HP. Go ahead and stock your inventory with Itanic processors, at some point you can sell them on eBay as novelty items.

Fred Dunn