Hewlett-Packard formally detailed its plans for the Itanium 2 processor on Monday, a key step in HP's strategy to take on IBM and Sun.
HP, which co-designed the chip, announced a wide variety of Itanium 2 products, including lower-end two- and four-processor systems that will ship in August, options to upgrade existing servers with the new chip, and eventually a mammoth machine with 128 Itanium processors. The company also released benchmarks touting the price/performance advantages of the new chip, which analysts say back up some of the promises made by Intel and HP about the chip.
"Itanium has now crossed the threshold to compete on par and in some cases to compete with an advantage," said Giga Information Group analyst Brad Day.
For example, on the widely used TPC-C test that simulates inventory transactions with a computerised warehouse, an HP rx5670 server with four Itanium 2 processors has a score of 78,000, bettering 55,000 of the IBM x440 system with eight Xeon MP processors. The Itanium system also costs less.
Itanium 2 is a key point in HP's strategy to simplify its multiple hardware and software lines while competing with IBM and Sun Microsystems. The processors are used in high-powered workstations and in servers, networked machines for jobs such as keeping track of corporate product sales. Currently, HP uses its own chips, the PA-RISC family, in these products now. Switching to Itanium is expected to help HP, the theory goes, by cutting down independent research and development.
The first Itanium had lopsided performance, doing well only on technical jobs such as physics simulations, but Itanium 2 expands into the much larger market for business software such as SAP's accounting software or tasks that require databases such as Microsoft's SQL Server.
"It wasn't until release of benchmarks by HP and Microsoft around SAP and SQL Server 2000 that we believed the Itanium 2 architecture had the balance to be aggressive both on technical and commercial computing," Day said.
The performance of the new processor family is key for HP in particular as the company places most of its eggs in the Itanium basket. IBM is backing Itanium but heavily investing in its own Power processors, while Sun is pushing its UltraSparc processors while grudgingly adopting low-end 32-bit Intel chips. By contrast, HP will not only adopt Itanium family chips into its machines that compete against Sun and IBM boxes, the company will also eventually insert the chip into the superhigh-end NonStop machines that it acquired in the Compaq Computer merger.
Eventually, HP will support five operating systems on the new processor: Windows, Linux, and three of its own products, HP-UX, OpenVMS and NonStop Kernel.
Itanium is a 64-bit chip, giving it the ability to easily address vast swathes of memory that 32-bit chips such as Intel's Pentium and Xeon can't manage. It also has capabilities for transferring information to and from memory more swiftly, features for accelerating data encryption, and improvements for working in large multiprocessor systems.
"In the longer term, we see it as a two-horse race--us and IBM," said Mark Hudson, worldwide manager for business critical systems at HP, in an interview.
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