Intel unveiled the next version of its Itanium processors, codenamed “Paulson”, for mission-critical IT systems, showing once again that the product line was not a dying one, an idea Oracle has been enthusiastically propagating.
The company made the announcement at a press conference in San Francisco jointly with HP, the biggest Itanium customer that builds servers based on the processor. At the event, HP unveiled the next generation of its Itanium-based servers.
Intel revealed a common platform strategy for Itanium and Xeon, its flagship x86 line. Rory McInerney, VP of Intel’s Architecture Group, said continuing both product lines ensured the company covered the entire data center market.
“Itanium is built for mission critical UNIX and mainframe OSs,” he said. “Xeon is built for Windows and Linux.”
The common-platform strategy was about Xeon and Itanium sharing most ingredients, including chipsets, interconnects, memory, sockets and packaging. The only difference will be the unique instruction sets each will need.
This way, Intel will be able to leverage Xeon’s production volume with Itanium. Xeon, on the other hand, will share Itanium’s Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) features. This is a list of features that includes things like memory error correction and detection, memory sparing and mirroring, hot-plug IO and memory hot swap, among others.
While Intel has not realized this cross-pollination vision, that is where it says the two architectures are going. We will see more of this with the arrival of Kittson and Haswell, the next generation of Itanium and Xeon, respectively, McInerney said.
The new Itanium 9500 processor is more powerful and energy efficient than the preceding 9300 version. Intel has increased the number of cores from four to eight, increased frequency to a maximum of 2.53Ghz and lowered its power consumption by 8%.
The Paulson-based hardware HP announced included new blade servers for its Superdome 2 system, three Integrity blades for its BladeSystem enclosure and an entry-level Integrity server for small businesses and branch offices.
HP recently won a legal fight with Oracle over its Itanium-based systems. Last year, Oracle tried to stop porting its software on Itanium systems, saying the architecture’s lifetime was coming to an end.
Oracle was following suit after other major software companies, including Microsoft and Red Hat had dropped their support for Itanium. HP sued, based on an agreement Oracle signed in 2010, committing to support of HP products.
This August, the court decided in HP’s favor, and the software giant that has also become a hardware vendor – when it bought Sun Microsystems – is now legally obligated to port its software on Itanium.
Both HP and Intel have maintained they have had no plans of discontinuing the Itanium line. “We didn’t have changed plans before [the lawsuit with Oracle],” McInerney said, commenting on the matter Thursday. “We don’t have changed plans after.”
Rick Lewis, VP and GM of HP’s Business Critical Systems unit, echoed McInerney. “We are not stopping on Itanium,” he said. “Full speed ahead.”