"Even IBM" supports Itanium, says Kicking Pat Gelsinger

TODAY IS about freedom, Intel said in a web cast. It is the end of "proprietary systems" for the server marketplace.

Server manager Pat Gelsinger, for it was he, described the intro of the Montecito Itanium now as "much anticipated", or in INQUIRER speak, late. It is the "summer of servers" and the Itanium is a bright star.

The Montecito, he said, ushers in an "era of freedom". This is the fifth generation of the Itanium in five years, and he is surrounded by "tons of iron" there in San Francisco.

Montecito will bring twice the performance for 20 per cent of the power, claimed Gelsinger. Mission critical machines "can never go down". Customers need scaleable performance and reliability, as well as security.

Hardware partners are Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, HP, NEC, a firm called SGI and Unisys. These represent eight tons of tin. Or seven if you discount SGI.

Itanium has support from Linux and even from Microsoft, said Gelsinger. The Itanium Solutions Alliance allows loads of firms to contribute to IA64.

"Even IBM" is interested in supporting the Itanium software, said Gelsinger, a way from those Sequent boxes IBM tried to sell a few years ago. Or from the list of Itanium supporters in 1995 which excluded Gateway and which caused Pat Gelsinger to get his "kicking" nickname.

SPARC and Power are losing momentum and the Itanium is gaining momentum, claimed Gelsinger. On a geographical basis Japan has the largest systems revenue from the Itanium, compared to Power and Sun SPARC.

One of Gelsinger's favourite chips was the 80486 of which he was the architect. But it didn't have nearly as many transistors as the Montecito has - it has 1.7 billion transistors. It is a technical "tour de force" with 24MB of cache.

HP has published benchies which show the Itanium is best at SQL processing. The huge on die cache makes a huge difference. µ