Despite years of marketing and product partnerships, Itanium remains a relative rarity among servers.
In the third quarter of this year, 7,845 Itanium servers were sold, according to research by Gartner.
We’re going to be the chip that runs everything,'" said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice.
“It so happens that promise has largely been achieved, but with x86.”
The saga illustrates the risks of such sweeping strategies.
Itanium did vanquish two rival chip families: Compaq’s Alpha and Silicon Graphics' MIPS.
“It’s not promising.
Billions invested
Intel and HP are mum about how much money has been invested in the project.
But some data points are clear.
Intel and HP acknowledge they’ve had challenges with Itanium but staunchly defend the effort.
“I think Itanium is still the architecture for the next 20 years,” Graff said.
“It’s the newest architecture that has come out.
It has the headroom.
I think the RISC architectures will run out of steam.”
Dividing the market between two chip families is a solid strategy, he added.
But that divide is somewhat artificial.
In addition, some potential customers are put off by Intel’s approach.
“Intel doesn’t want you to build greater than four-socket topologies of Xeon,” he said.
Intel’s moves to keep Xeon competitive hurt Itanium.
So far, none of those goals has been met.
The chip, initially code-named PA-WideWord, used an architecture called Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, or EPIC.
HP hoped the design would execute more instructions in parallel by lining them up in advance for maximum speed.
(x86 chips are CISC designs, though their external interfaces now cloak faster RISC-like cores.)
The initial Itanium prospects were impressive.
All the major server and operating systems companies jumped on board.
Sun created a version ofSolaris for Itaniumin the 1990s.
AndSilicon Graphics decided to support Itanium and Linuxin 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.
Itanium derailed
Then big problems hit.
The first Itanium, code-namedMerced, was delayed from 1999 to mid-2000.
However, “when Merced arrived, it was a turd.”
EvenHP called Merced a mere “development environment.”
The delays forced SGI toextend its MIPS chip family by two generationsand cancel its first-generation Itanium system.
“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.
“I don’t think you’re able to span the entire sever market with one architecture.
The new direction diminished Itanium’s potential influence.
But the problems went beyond hardware.
HP and Intel have made progress on the software front.
They now have a list of 5,000 applications that run on Itanium, about half of them for HP-UX.
In addition, they launched theItanium Solutions Alliancethis year to help lure more.
Unfortunately, 5,000 applications still isn’t enough.
Newer troubles
The October news of Montecito’s delay isn’t the Itanium’s only recent trouble.
Intel has also lowered the chip’s planned top speed and disabled a 200MHz performance-boosting feature called Foxton.
On top of that, some Itanium allies have departed or backed away.
IBMandDell dropped Itanium serversthis year, leaving HP the only one of the top server makers to sell them.
SGI, already struggling financially, has been hit again.
SGI still believes it made the right decision, though.
“Intel is going onward and upward with additional dual-core and multicore designs.
We see them as great engines to our systems,” Parry said.
The October change particularly affected Unisys, whose ES7000 line can accommodate both Xeon and Itanium chips.
That would have simplified Unisys server designs.
Competitors have become increasingly eager to pounce on Itanium.
“It doesn’t have that critical mass.”
And Sun PresidentJonathan Schwartz said on his blogin November that Itanium is headed for “a lingering death.”
But through it all, Itanium allies maintain their optimism.
“We certainly had our challenges,” HP’s Huck said.
“All in all, we’re coming out ahead.”
