Intel: x86 won't encroach on Itanium

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companies still cooperate when it comes to Xeon, the Pentium big brother designed for servers. "IBM's a huge customer for us for Xeon. It's their fastest-growing business line," he said.

Intel's goal is to provide a high-end processor for as many server makers as possible. Even with IBM's departure, Intel still has Itanium partnerships with Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, NEC, Silicon Graphics Inc. and Unisys. "Our job is to give everybody an opportunity to compete in that high end," Gelsinger said. Those customers must ask themselves whether they want to use Itanium or to "live on IBM's intellectual property," he said.

In fairness, it's not quite that simple. Fujitsu, for example, also has a major Sparc processor development program in cooperation with Sun.

Different memory designs could help Itanium, Reynolds said. Today's Itanium requires vast amounts of high-speed cache memory to be competitive, but a retooled memory system could make the chip smaller and more competitive, he said.

Intel's biggest chip competitors--AMD, IBM and Sun--all have moved a crucial computer component, the memory controller, directly onto the central processor, which quickens memory access speeds. But it's likely that they won't have that advantage forever.

A probable time frame for making that change at Intel is 2007, when the chipmaker plans to unify the interface between Xeon and Itanium chips, a move that would make it easier for computer designers to make dual-use components.

Gelsinger wouldn't comment on when or whether Intel will include an on-board memory controller, but he did say, "Over time, you will see us make adjustments to memory hierarchy."

[fred dunn]

Intel is delusional...

Cite their push of RDRAM, and their total exclusion of x86 64 bit extensions. This is another bad decision that has gone too far.

If and when Intel designs an Itanium with efficient x86 VM microcode then they will pull it off, otherwise the original big metal players will kill them due to their experience in the market.