Itanium juggernaut will drive into datacentres
Intel's 64bit Itanium processor has made slow progress so far, but corporates will adopt it
Intel is accustomed to receiving torrents of brickbats concerning its 64bit Itanium processor. The unpalatable truth for critics, however, is that this brute-force chip remains set fair to cruise into enterprise datacentres.
When Intel introduced the Itanium in 2001 many industry watchers expected a more rapid progress than has turned out to be the case. In part, that optimism could be ascribed to the long run-up to launch. The chip had been knocking around by reputation under the Merced codename since late in 1996 and even before that as the P7. The P7 moniker suggested Itanium was a smooth transition to the seventh generation of the Intel architecture but in fact it was much more: a fundamental architectural change, even beyond the leaps Intel had made with the 32bit 386 or the new instruction set of the Pentium.
The Itanium was not only entering the new domain of the 64bit world but one where rival camps were entrenched. In the 32bit space, Intel could move largely without opposition and serve a market generally hungry for Mips thanks to sequential advances such as Windows, multimedia and the internet. But with Itanium, Intel had moved up through the weights to confront bigger boys in the shape of Sun and IBM. Also, entering the datacentre is a vastly different prospect to client computing where changes could me made with relatively little cost and hassle. If it didn't already know, Intel found out pretty quickly that PCs move a lot faster off shelves than enterprise servers.
As part of the Wintel evil empire Intel was there to be shot at, and it didn't have to wait long for the snipers to arrive. With early Itanium sales in the hundreds of CPUs and only tentative support from server makers, the new processor on the block was quickly christened Itanic by carpers.
But Itanium is no disaster, only a victim of inflated expectations such as those of credulous analyst firm Aberdeen Group, which in February 2001 predicted that Itanium would account for 42 percent of server revenue by 2005. With a share of less than one percent today, it has some catching up to do.
But Itanium's arrival as a datacentre force remains more a case of "when" than "if". As last week's release of the Itanium 2 6M underlined, the chip's main strength will be in offering a flag of convenience for server makers that need to give customers the option of running current and legacy systems rather than locking them in to a more limited approach. Take for example HP, which is pointing the way to Itanium as the way forward for its huge base of OpenVMS, Tru64 Unix, HP-UX and other users currently running on VAX, Alpha and PA-Risc hardware.
Itanium remains a dot in terms of volume but software application support has swollen to over 400 packages and hardware is blossoming, with even Dell on board.
Many buyers will choose to stay with tried and trusted environments such as IBM's Power-based servers or Sun's Sparc/Solaris combination, while others will seek the comfort of a 32bit fallback position and buy AMD's Opteron. But the volume of support behind Itanium makes it the long-term path of least obstruction. Itanium may not be in your datacentre tomorrow, next year or even the year after that but it probably will be one day - and for the rest of your life.