Itanium: A cautionary tale

Published: December 7, 2005, 4:00 AM PST

TalkBack E-mail Print TrackBack

(continued from previous page)

The initial Itanium prospects were impressive. All the major server and operating systems companies jumped on board.

Sun created a version of Solaris for Itanium in the 1990s. IBM joined with the Santa Cruz Operation and Sequent to combine their Unix products into an Itanium operating system code-named Monterey. Microsoft offered Windows 2000 for Itanium. Linux allies banded with Intel and server makers in a project called Trillian to adapt the open-source operating system to the chip. Compaq's Tru64 Unix was up and running on an Itanium software. And Silicon Graphics decided to support Itanium and Linux in preference to its own MIPS processor and Irix operating system.

"The momentum was huge," Gwennap said. "There was this incredible anticipation and expectation that this was going to be the next big thing. Intel was on a roll, and with HP backing them, then other companies started jumping on the bandwagon."

Itanium derailed
Then big problems hit. The first Itanium, code-named Merced, was delayed from 1999 to mid-2000. When it arrived even later, in May 2001, even lowly x86 chips beat it in important performance tests.

When Intel and HP launched the Itanium project, "they thought they had just laid the golden egg," Eunice said. However, "when Merced arrived, it was a turd."

Even HP called Merced a mere "development environment."

The delays forced SGI to extend its MIPS chip family by two generations and cancel its first-generation Itanium system. "We had a product we designed based on the Merced chip which we elected not to take into the market," said Dave Parry, general manager for SGI's server group.

And Sun--admittedly a lukewarm ally that never planned to sell its own Itanium servers--dropped Solaris support in 2000.

Intel got the Itanium train back on the tracks after Merced, doubling performance with "McKinley" in 2002. In 2003, it launched "Madison" with 6MB of on-board cache memory; the next year, it unveiled "Madison 9M" with 9MB of cache and a plan for the 2005 release of the dual-core "Montecito."

"Montecito is a fundamentally new, true dual-core design. It does get significant performance advantages over the previous single-core parts," Glaskowsky said.

Behind the scenes, there had been another Itanium shift. An ambitious future-generation product code-named Tanglewood had been planned with as many as 16 processing cores, according to a source familiar with the plan and a document about the chip seen by CNET News.com. But in December 2003, Intel announced the model would be called Tukwila instead--quietly moving to a more conventional design that had four or more cores, slated for release in 2007.

Retreat to the high end
As Intel grappled to produce desirable Itanium products, it gradually reduced its ambitions until the chip's niche was just high-end systems. Itanium is tailored for "the biggest iron," Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president of the Digital Enterprise Group in charge of the servers, said in a March interview.

"I was the one who initiated that, probably two-and-a-half years ago," Marcello said of the high-end shift. "I don't think you can span the entire sever market with one architecture. Originally, Itanium was envisioned as an architecture to replace the entire spectrum, and that turned out to be overly ambitious."

The new direction diminished Itanium's potential influence. "Each time, it was whittled to a smaller and smaller niche, trying to make it more successful," Krewell said.

In 2004, Intel acknowledged that Itanium shipments weren't meeting the company's goals--it had hoped to double its chip sales total in 2004, from 100,000 in 2003.

TalkBack E-mail Print TrackBack

Read more on this story's topics and companies

• Add to My News | Create an alert Processors
• Add to My News | Create an alert x86-standard servers
• Add to My News | Create an alert Servers
• Add to My News | Create an alert Intel Corp
• Add to My News | Create an alert Hewlett-packard
• Add to My News | Create an alert Sun Microsystems Inc
• Add to My News | Create an alert Intl Business Machines Corp
• Add to My News | Create an alert Advanced Micro Devices

TalkBack

Did you know?

Select a tab below to set your default view.