Intel's New Technology: The Itanium 2

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Itanium 2 processor, microprocessors, high-end enterprise, business intelligence, databases, enterprise resource planning, SCM, computing, computer-aided engineering

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Competition Contd...

At the end of 2002, Sun announced it would not support chips from Intel with the release of its Solaris 9 operating system this year. Sun also did not offer Solaris support for Itanium 2. Although Sun is once working on a version of Solaris that would run on Itanium, those efforts have ended. Both companies'pointed fingers at each other for stopping the effort. Intel, meanwhile, has little chance of getting its Itanium 2 chips embedded with Solaris as Sun did give a port to Solaris with Itanium 2.

Dell has made its fortune using the Intel standard but that has been in the 32-bit world. In highend corporate hardware, Dell is not a significant player. Dell hoped that Itanium would click and Intel would supply it with sufficiently engineered complete systems so that it could move into the higher end of the market. It planned to ship a relatively simple Itanium 2 system in 2003. But Dell is not following its archrival HP and putting all its bets on Intel. It is also seriously looking at Opteron. According to Randy Groves, Dell's chief technology officer:⁸

"What makes this different from past AMD discussions is that until now AMD's value proposition has been Intel compatibility at a lower cost. Now it's not a pricing discussion. This is something Intel doesn't have."

But Dell believes that AMD has to prove that Opteron performed and that it could make it consistently in volume. Though AMD is more popular with consumers rather than businesses, Dell believed that AMD could move into the business server segment at a future date.

Intel maintained that Itanium 2, unlike Opteron, is designed for the next 20 years. To generate demand, Intel is building what it called an "ecosystem" around the chip. In early 2003, IBM announced it would be sharing technology and manufacturing know-how with AMD creating the distinct possibility of AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64 chips being manufactured in IBM's plants. That could help IBM and make it harder for Intel to convince customers to give their existing software and move on to Itanium. If IBM helped Opteron, it could also force Intel's hand and create an awkward choice for HP. Intel is widely believed to have a contingency plan in place: A 64-bit chip, reportedly called Yamhill, which featured the same Pentium compatibility as AMD's Opteron. If Opteron took off, it is expected to be only a matter of time before Intel launched Yamhill. And the better Yamhill did, the less software writers would feel the need to write programs that run on Itanium.

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8] Source: See This Chip? Fortune, February 3, 2003.