Intel: Itanium Plans Not Affected by New Xeon Family Chips

From X-bit Labs: Intel Corp. on Tuesday again reaffirmed that even though Xeon microprocessors are gaining RAS [reliability, availability, serviceability] capabilities, Intel Itanium platform, which was mainly designed for mission-critical servers with RAS features, will remain important part of Intel's offerings.

“Instead of Itanium at the top and Xeon at the bottom of the lineup, we are going to have them side by side. With server vendors including Windows, Linux and Solaris now running on the Xeon architecture, there’s no workload in the world today that Xeon can’t handle," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s data center group.

Recently Oracle announced that it would stop designing new software for Intel Itanium-based servers, which are available from HP and SGI only at the moment. The company noted that, on the one hand, Intel adds RAS capabilities to the Xeon platform, which means that the chip giant wants x86 architecture to serve top-to-bottom of the lineup; on the other hand companies like Microsoft and Red Hat also had dropped developing software for IA64. Both Intel and HP said that the Itanium roadmap extends for more than ten years.

Unfortunately for Itanium, Intel Xeon is not only supported by a broad amount of applications and software, but it also offers higher number of cores and outperforms Itanium in a lot of cases. Intel retorts that the evolution of Itanium is not on the company's typical tick-tock schedule.

“Itanium is on a two-year beat rate. Xeon is delivering up to 40% performance, which is a world record. Since Itanium is not on a tick-tock schedule, Xeon and Itanium will leap-frog each other," said Mr. Skaugen.

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