HP advises customers on how to sell Itaniums, Opterons and EM64Ts

YOU'RE PROBABLY WONDERING what happened to my old friend Jill, who used to work at Transmeta and spilled the beans down on the boardwalk.

She moved away from there a good while ago but has tipped up polishing the silver cutlery over at HP Cupertino.

And when I met her last week, she spilled the beans about how her new employer will sell Itaniums against Opterons against EM64Ts, and when to sell what.

HP is claiming that it's still committed to a standards platform strategy but right now it's got HP Nonstop on MIPs, HP Integrity on Itanic, HP9000 on PA RISC, HP Alpha servers, and X86 based ProLiants.

HP reckons that the Opteron and Intel's EM64T - that is Chipzilla servers which use the iAMD64 stuff, are going to be optimised for one to four way servers while the Itanic will be optimised for 128 way servers.

Carly's firm is now saying to its customers that the Opteron "offers significant performance gains", with for example a 4P DL585 beating the pants off a 3GHz 4MB Xeon system, with better performance up to 40% and for nearly all applications.

A 2P DL145 Opteron gives an extra 15% performance on web stuff, and a staggering 40% on memory intensive stuff.

She says HP says that the Opteron on raw speed beats the pants off Itaniums too.

But the Itanic does a heap better on TPC-C, she reckons compared to Opterons.

Figures HP are touting show that the Opteron will continue to beat the pants off the Xeons, even over the next three years.

The Itanic II will address 1024TB with a system bandwidth of 6.4GB/s, while the Opteron tackles 1TB of memory, using 6.4GB/s but also has 16x16cHTT.

Intel copied AMD plan to extend the X86 architecture to 64-bit addressing with EM64T. But HP and Intel made a whole new architecture with the Itanic.

As far as memory latency goes, Opteron 2P deliver 65-100 nanoseconds, 4P 64-140ns, while the Itanic two achieves 80ns for a 2P system, 95ns for a 4P system, and around 150ns for an eight way system.

Intel's EM64T has 64-bit wide general purpose registers, 48-bit of virtual addressing, and up to 40 bits of physical addressing. But Intel Noconas will only address 40-bits and Potomac will do the same.

HP's not too worried about the Opteron Itanium overlap, which it thinks is inevitable. It things 64-bitness in everything is becoming quite pervasive and it just needs to position things properly to sell its ProLiants and Integrity servers.

It believes that compared to the Itanic, Intel and AMD's 64-bit systems are where the Itanic were four years back. But they don't bring much new to big tin computing, unlike the Itanic, and are going to hit a technology ceiling sooner or later.

Intel has apparently promised HP that prices of the Itanic chips will be the same as Xeons by 2007.

But in the meantime it's pretty clear that HP believes Opteron has the clear edge on any Intel Xeons that Chipzilla can throw out.

Sheesh kebab! µ