A Revolution in Enterprise Computing - the Itanium processorMunich 23 July 2001 Ajay Malhotra discussed Intel's view of the announcement. He highlighted the cost aspects, the business' needs and the initiatives with Compaq.
The global economy has slowed down but the users expectations
have not slowed. The Internet continues to drive need for new
business practices, and the IT infrastructure enables
competitiveness. The challenge today is how to get performance,
scalability and flexibility needed at a controllable cost. He
mentioned that one year the solution was more important than the
cost, but this has now turned the other way round.
He mentioned that the co-operation of Compaq and Intel will
accelerate the enterprise server roadmaps. This means for Intel:
customer value for the enterprise
enhanced and accelerated adoption of Itanium processor family
Intel architecture grow in the high-end
strong alliance to build upon.
The joint Compaq/Intel initiatives embrace the joint effort on
software solutions enabling. There is a co-ordinated ISV
engagement and end user pilot. Six end user pilots are currently
on-going in Europe. An other aspect is the convergence of all
Compaq enterprise servers high-end platform on Itanium.
Shortly he mentioned the processor features, 733/800 MHz clock
frequency with 20 operations per clock by EPIC, 4 MB high-speed
on-cartridge L3 cache, 325 mio. transistors (25 mio in CPU, 300
mio in L2 cache), 2.1 GB/s multi-drop system bus, and extensive
reliability and availability by ECC, parity protection and
enhanced machine check architecture.
He presented some Itanium performance results. In large
databases, online transaction processing there is +30%
performance vs. reference 4-way solution on RISC. In secure
e-commerce (RSA algorithm) serves over 10 times more secured web
pages compared to RISC. In the CERN sixtrack benchmark the gain
was more than 32% compared to best of class current RISC system.
He summed up with the strong industry momentum behind Intel
Itanium processor family. The Compaq endorsement dramatically
accelerates Intel architecture enterprise solutions.
Uwe Harms |
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