Itanium 2 - the year's biggest hardware release all about software?

The irony...

What will make or break Intel's most complex and powerful product yet? Suzi Kerridge has been asking around... Call it the Itanium 2 epic. Steven Spielberg would be proud of it. Seven years in the making. Two years late. Over budget. Yet clearly one of the year's biggest releases. Intel's sequel to Itanium - its first 64-bit processor - is now selling and the chip company is betting the (server) farm on its commercial success. Big brother Itanium mark 1 wasn't a commercial success but analysts were willing to excuse that, claiming the release was a tentative debut, more for developer purposes. The aim of Itanium 1 - Merced, as it was known, pre-release - was to test the water and help the server companies migrating to the new Intel environment. It was hello IA-64. Itanium 2, however, is an entirely different cut of silicon wafer. This time Intel intends to make money and Itanium 2 is the basis of its strategy for the next 15-20 years, not just the next two or three. Chris Ingle, senior consultant at analyst house IDC, said: "Merced was not really an end user processor and Intel's hope now is that there'll be commercial applications. Businesses will stop looking at it and start using it." He is among the experts who agree Intel must start making serious revenue outside the desktop space. However, sales forecasts aren't high, mainly because of the lack of commercial end user business applications right now that will run better on Itanium 2. Intel rival Sun has unsurprisingly homed in on this fact. Itanium 2 runs in direct competition with Sun UltraSparc processors, which are 64-bit and have been for years - which means there is plenty of software out there already taking advantage of them. Andy Butler, a VP at Gartner Group, told silicon.com that large volume Itanium sales will not be a reality until the processor's next generation comes to the fore. Unfortunately for Intel, the current economic environment makes the landscape even tougher. IDC's Ingle added: "If Intel had launched this product a couple of years ago it would have been different. But now it is a buyer's market and companies are looking for the lowest prices and shopping around." Many of the heavier users of 64-bit systems, which are usually behind heavily transaction-based processes such as those in financial services and telecoms, are not looking at new architectures at the moment. This will delay though not kill the adoption of the platform. Vincent Smith, European server advocate at IBM, a company which is both a big Intel customer and competitor with its Power processors, said his company is very enthusiastic about Itanium but also expressed concern over the lack of business-ready applications. "There are a lot soft issues affecting Itanium. For example, the poor environment it is launching in and the business culture at the moment. But then there's the fact that many customers are waiting for the application providers." So concerned is IBM that it has decided to wait for key business applications, said Smith, before it releases any of its own Itanium-based products. But if Intel will only break through with its next generation, code-named Montecito, as predicted by analysts, then a return on all its investment will take a long time. There are five or six Itanium versions on Intel's roadmap over the coming years with the next two, Madison and Montecito, being compatible with the current Itanium architecture. Madison, the successor to McKinley (which became the current Itanium 2), is scheduled for release in the next 12 months. Deerfield, dubbed Madison's poor relative by critics, will offer 1MB of Level 3 cache instead of the 1.5MB and 3MB provided by McKinley, at a lower cost. Perhaps the biggest boost will come when Microsoft releases the .Net version of its advanced server software towards the end of the year. Software vendors such as BEA, i2, Oracle and SAP are also building applications for Itanium 2-based systems. But these are not scheduled for release until later in the year as well. The Intel spiel claims hundreds of companies are piloting Itanium - and despite the row over Dell snubbing the launch there are over 20 major server manufacturers on board - but until the application vendors get their act together it will be a long time before Itanium 2 means 64bit processing courtesy of the world's biggest chip-maker is an everyday thing.