Itanium revisited - one year on
Quocirca's Straight Talking: Is the Itanic sunk?
Despite a high-profile launch, HP and Intel's Itanium chip has failed to make much of a splash. But does that mean a watery grave for the flagship processor? Quocirca's Dennis Szubert investigates.
A little over a year ago, in Itanium - what's in a name?, I took a look at Intel's high-end processor. My conclusion was it never stood a chance of living up to the early hype of replacing the ubiquitous x86 architecture in providing an industry standard across an unprecedented range of computing platforms. But neither was it quite as dead as its Itanic nickname suggested.
That article, taking the chip's nickname as its cue, looked at the parallels with and myths surrounding the maiden voyage of the Titanic - you may find this 30-second potted history useful. This time round we follow in the footsteps of the oceanographer and marine biologist Dr Robert Ballard, discoverer of the remains of the Titanic in 1985 and the first person to see the vessel since it slipped into the icy darkness in 1912. In addition, we take a look at the significance of the codenames assigned to the chip.
As we hover over the site of the tragedy in our submersible, we find its final resting place strangely lacking in the dignified silence that befits it. Where is the wreck for starters?
With all the tenacious grip on life of Rasputin - poisoned, shot four times, bludgeoned, stabbed and thrown into the Neva River where he eventually died, reputedly from hypothermia while trying to claw his way out from the ice - Itanium can rightfully lay claim to the title "the chip that would not die".
The internal Intel handle could equally well be "the chip that must not be named". Hardly mentioned at the Intel Developers Forum this September, the next-generation Itanium 9100 processor line, codenamed Montvale, was released in a strangely muted fashion in October. It could easily have passed unnoticed had it not been rumbled by a few observant journalists and analysts.
Why the low profile? The 9100 was over a year late and had a clock speed of more than half of what was once planned. Perhaps Intel felt it had lost its bragging rights. The 1.66GHz clock speed put it at just a smidgen (3.75 per cent) higher than the 1.60GHz of its Montecito predecessor, named after a swanky Santa Barbara neighbourhood that is home to Oprah, Steve Martin, John Cleese, Steven Spielberg, Kevin Costner and Kirk Douglas, among other stars.
In comparison, the New Jersey borough of Montvale only has Shaun Weiss, who played one of the hockey players in the The Mighty Ducks films and Elvis on Pee-wee's Playhouse. Hmm - there could be a pattern here - the 9100 named after the no-doubt worthy, but not quite so exotic, New Jersey location precisely because it is more pedestrian.
If that is the case, a warning to our American cousins: if Intel ever decides to call a chip Moss Side or Brixton you are in big trouble.
To be fair, the new processor does contain a new RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) feature called Core Level Lock-Step. It also offers demand-based switching to improve the power consumption of servers by dialling down the chip when not in use. The faster 667MHz front-side bus, up from 533MHz, contributes to a claimed 19 per cent performance uplift.
But the new Itanium chip has two processor cores like Montecito and the same amount of cache. It is also based on the same ancient 90-nanometre process technology.
Back to the Quocirca submersible: as the underwater beam cuts through the darkness, here and there some interesting flashes catch our attention. Although progress with the chip itself may have been disappointing, we detect definite signs of life in the surrounding eco-system. What has happened over the past 12 months to make our revisit worthwhile?
Recent server shipment figures show HP shooting past industry averages and, in particular, boosting high-end server shipments in the Risc-Itanium market. Could it be that despite Itanium delays and disappointments, the transition from PA-Risc and Alpha is going better for HP than expected?
The Itanium Solutions Alliance formed in September 2005 with the aim of accelerating the porting of applications to Itanium - long a drag on Itanium adoption - now boasts more than 12,000 applications in its catalogue.
Hitachi America began selling its BladeSymphony in North America. Previously only available in its home market of Japan, this has either Itanium or Xeon blades. The Itanium version allows up to four two-socket blades to be ganged up with special cables to create a 16-core SMP box and also include Hitachi's own virtual machine hypervisor, called Virtage, which controls the blades as a pool and allows for their carving up into virtual machines.
Manchester University spin-off, Transitive, began shipping a variant of its QuickTransit application emulation environment to allow applications compiled for Sparc processors running Solaris to be moved to Linux servers based on either Itanium or X64 processors. HP and Hitachi hope to use it to cash in on the ageing Sparc-Solaris server base.
Then there is Platform Solutions Inc (PSI). Billing itself as a maker of mainframe computers, PSI has come up with the necessary firmware to run mainframe applications code on any Itanium-based server.
The interesting thing about PSI's computers is that they consolidate IBM's z/OS, Windows and Linux into a single operating environment running on Itanium processors. IBM is clearly concerned enough to threaten users with withdrawal of support if they move its OS and apps to an Itanium server and is suing PSI for breach of contract and patent infringement.
PSI in turn is bringing antitrust charges against IBM and it has some big friends. It is close to HP - it gets it hardware from HP, and was almost purchased by the company just before the IBM lawsuit. PSI recently raised a war-chest of more than $37m in fresh capital to see it through the litigation from a group of investors including Microsoft.
The other investors - BluePrint Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Intel, InterWest Partners and Bahrain-based InvestCorp - have no axe to grind and evidently think the start-up has legs.
Returning to the codename hypothesis, Quocirca is convinced enough to propose elevating it to the status of a law: "The significance of any new Itanium release is directly proportional to the density of celebrities residing in the neighbourhood chosen as the codename for that product". Move over Gordon Moore.
Now to put that to the test. The next generation Itanium chip - due to arrive sometime in 2008 or 2009 - is codenamed Tukwila. It is a quad-core version, based on the 65-nanometre process and is by all accounts going to be a screamer.
Yet, Tukwila, a city six miles south of Seattle seems strangely bereft of glitterati. According to its Wikipedia entry, Tukwila has "long been associated with poverty" and "homelessness has been and continues to be an issue in the last decades".
Based on Szubert's Law, Quocirca's advice to Tukwila residents is: prepare yourselves for a sudden influx of Beckhams, Britneys and Brads from Los Angeles. Either that or else the next Itanium release may just not be that good.