- Related Stories
-
Fabric7 banks on high-end x86 servers
November 1, 2005 -
HP's Itanium blade due in early 2006
November 1, 2005 -
Intel pushes back Itanium chips, revamps Xeon
October 24, 2005 -
Dell shuttering Itanium server business
September 15, 2005 -
IBM server design drops Itanium support
February 25, 2005 -
Itanium--one step forward, one back
January 5, 2005 -
HP to make $3 billion Itanium commitment
December 15, 2004 -
'Tanglewood' to top Intel chip show
August 29, 2003
Eleven years and billions of dollars later, Itanium serves instead as a cautionary tale of how complex, long-term development plans can go drastically wrong in a fast-moving industry.
Despite years of marketing and product partnerships, Itanium remains a relative rarity among servers. In the third quarter of this year, 7,845 Itanium servers were sold, according to research by Gartner. That compares with 62,776 machines with Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc, 31,648 with IBM's Power, and 9,147 with HP's PA-RISC.
What's new:
The recent delay in the release date for the first dual-core Itanium underlines the shrinking ambitions and scope of the Intel processor, once vaunted as an industry-changing chip.
Bottom line:
The chip's story serves as a cautionary tale of how complex, long-term development plans can go drastically wrong in a fast-moving industry.
But perhaps most significant, it compares with 1.7 million servers with x86 chips, based on an architecture Itanium was intended to replace.
"At the original launch, the claims from HP and Intel were essentially saying, 'If you're not with us, you're going to die. We're going to be the chip that runs everything,'" said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice. "It so happens that promise has largely been achieved, but with x86."
The saga illustrates the risks of such sweeping strategies. While grand plans offer the promise of major rewards, long development cycles mean many more chances to stumble or be overtaken by unanticipated events--such as x86's longevity. Itanium isn't a unique example; Microsoft's ambitious "Longhorn" version of Windows has been delayed and pared back several times, meaning that some technology the company hoped to release in the 1990s won't show up until 2006 or later.
Itanium did vanquish two rival chip families: Compaq's Alpha and Silicon Graphics' MIPS. It also has respectable performance and is gradually replacing the PA-RISC family from HP, which sold 79 percent of all Itanium servers in the third quarter of 2005, according to Gartner figures.
But the processor's long history has more notably been marked by a series of missteps that undermined its heir-apparent status.
The latest problem cropped up in late October, when Intel announced that the release of the first dual-core Itanium, code-named Montecito, would be delayed from 2005 until mid-2006. Earlier problems included other delays, poor initial performance and software incompatibility with the processors it was designed to replace.
Moreover, throughout Itanium's inglorious debut, Intel was dramatically improving x86 chips, and IBM, Sun and Advanced Micro Devices poured more resources into their rival chips.
The future looks unlikely to get better, said Kevin Krewell, editor-in-chief of industry newsletter Microprocessor Report. "It's not promising. It has a space that will be there for a number of years, but it's been marginalized," Krewell said. "It's not hard to see that Itanium is not going to go much beyond the niche of replacing Alpha and PA-RISC."
Billions invested
Intel and HP are mum about how much money has been invested in the project. But some data points are clear. Albert Yu, general manager of Intel's microprocessor products group, was quoted in Electronic Engineering Times in 1994 as saying the joint development effort for Itanium would entail an investment of $400 million to $500 million over several years.
But the project grew well beyond that price tag as it slipped and backers had to pump funding into a massive effort to get third parties to revamp software for the new chip family. Several analysts estimate the cost as multiple billions of dollars, and the spending hasn't stopped: In December 2004, HP pledged to spend a further $3 billion to fund Itanium-related software, hardware and marketing work.
"The fact that they spent so much money to develop Itanium implies to me they expected an equally huge return on that investment," said Linley Group analyst Linley Gwennap, who followed Itanium closely for years for Microprocessor Report.
Intel and HP acknowledge they've had challenges with Itanium but staunchly defend the effort. "I think it's doing very well," said Lisa Graff, general manager of Intel's high-end server group. She points to gains in Itanium's scaled-back mission of replacing Power, UltraSparc and other reduced instruction set computing (RISC) chips and observes that half of the world's 100 biggest companies use Itanium systems.
"I think Itanium is still the architecture for the next 20 years," Graff said. "It's the newest architecture that has come out. It has the headroom. I think the RISC architectures will run out of steam."
- More from News.com on this story's topics
x86-standard servers
Processors
Hardware servers
Hewlett-Packard
Advanced Micro Devices
Sun Microsystems
Intel
IBM
See more CNET content tagged:
Intel Itanium,
HP PA-RISC,
AMD,
Intel x86,
microprocessor
Intel wants to dictate technology to the public rather than being driven by the publics wishes.
Their marketing and engineering folks need to get out more because they are on a fast track to losing the public's trust.
Fred Dunn
power-hog maybe, but at the time it was designed
power efficiency wasn't a design priority.
The problem with Itanium is specifically that
the designers were aiming for a processor with a
revolutionary way of managing instructions that
would permit novel algorithms to perform with
brutal efficiency. Of course, what Intel
marketed the thing as a revolutionary step in
the evolution of the x86 microprocessor line.
The problem being, of course, it was the former
and not the latter. Itaniums are excellent
processors for a very specific subset of
algorithms. The CPU itself doesn't do all the
instruction reordering and such of its
predecessors, instead relying on the compiler to
do these things for you -- and the compiler
often requires the developer to code algorithms
a certain way to take advantage of the CPUs
abilities (much more so than is necessary on
other CPUs). If you ran existing software on it,
you got mediocre results, and the cost of the
CPU was (and really still is) just plain silly.
I had taken some training from Intel on Itanium
development for scientists. It was very
elightening, and I can really appreciate what a
beautiful piece of work Itanium (and Intel's
development tools) were. But at the same time, I
had to balk. I was not likely to recode the
applications I use day in and day out for
Itanium, and I would be beholden to others to do
the same for me. Even though I do develop some
software, I just wasn't interested in having to
go into that level of detail to get the
performance boost I expected. If I were, I'd
have been writing assembly code.
Itanium is flagging not because it's a bad CPU,
only because for the majority it's not the best
CPU or best CPU for the money given what people
need to run today, and because the barrier to
making software that could make it the best is
getting higher the more software people use.
The best case scenario for Itanium would be a
move to a JVM or CLR explicitly tuned for
Itanium and a broad shift to running VM-based
software. Intel probably recognized that but
weren't prepared to affect that shift on their
own.
Man, Intel should scrap Itanium to save money
I disagree with a previous poster's belief that Sun's Niagara is the nail in Itanium's coffin. The nail was Microsoft when they said no to 64-bit windows using Itanium's ill concieved instruction set.
If Intel priced their Itanium 2 chips competetively, their sales volume would surge.
DEC, then Compaq, continued the company line of "Alpha forever", just as Intel/HP are continuing the "Itanium forever" company line. But Itanium will suffer the same fate.
And folks like me will buy AMD Opteron and love the performance, ease of use, and happy users.
- Why don't they just give and admit Defeat
-
by kakphoto
December 9, 2005 2:18 PM PST
- While back in the early days it might have been a good thought, today AMD is the only way to go.
-
Reply to this comment
-
-
1 | 2 | Next 10 Comments >>I am old VAX/VMS operator and migrated to the Alphas using OPEN VMS and TRU64. Even the older 400 or so MHZ processors can out do even the newer Servers today. They can run forever without rebooting. Most Windows servers need to be rebooted Daily or weekly even Server 2003.
Then the IBM AS/400's need to be Booted (IPL'd) often.
Yes The Alpha's were 64bit, But they were not meant for Workstation use. They were meant to crunch numbers, and the did that very well.
When Compaq bought DEC, Intel got the rights for the ALPHA, but they still couldn't get the ITANIUM to work. AMD actually hired the People who created the ALPHA chip. Its no wonder why they are overtaking INTEL.