Guild Companies

Windows & Linux Edition
Volume 1, Number 42 -- December 11, 2002

But Wait, There's More . . .

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

"Madison" Itanium 2 Could Hit 1.5 GHz . . . IBM Acquires Development Tool Maker Rational for $2.1 Billion . . . Big Blue Delivers Linux-Ready pSeries 630s . . . Dell Shipping PowerEdge 1655MC Blade Server . . . HP Announces New ProLiants . . .

Intel plans to lift the curtain on the "Madison" third generation Itanium processor at the IEEE's International Solid State Circuits Conference in February in San Francisco. According to the advanced program for the conference, Intel will show off a 1.5 GHz Itanium chip that is 374 square millimeters in size, has 410 million transistors on chip, and includes 6 MB of 24-way set associative L3 cache memory on the chip. The Itanium chip, which has to be Madison, is based on a six-level 0.13 micron copper-dielectric process and the chip dissipates 130 watts at that high clock speed. If history is any guide, Intel will deliver a 1.2 GHz, 1.3 GHz and/or 1.4 GHz version of the Madison chip with only 3 MB of L3 cache activated to create a slower and lower priced version of the chip; these have been referred to as the "Deerfield" versions of the third generation Itaniums, but Deerfield might be an even more streamlined chip that includes as little as 1 MB of L3 cache and runs as slow as 1 GHz. Such a chip would be very powerful in terms of processing capacity, but would generate a lot less heat than a full-blown Madison, making Deerfield appropriate for blade servers and other dense configurations where heat is an issue.

IBM liked the development tools so much, it bought the company. Rational Software, that is, a maker of development tools for Unix, Windows, and Linux environments that wrap around Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, IBM's WebSphere Studio, and various Java, C, and C++ compilers to create a managed application development environment. IBM is paying a hefty $2.1 billion in cash to acquire Rational, which counts IBM as one of its biggest customers. That is the first big acquisition of CEO Sam Palmisano's tenure, and the biggest deal IBM has done since chairman Louis Gerstner bought Lotus for $3.5 billion in 1995. The Rational brand products will be managed within IBM's Software Group by Michael Devlin, Rational's CEO, who will report to Steve Mills, general manager of Software Group. The Rational products will not be branded under the WebSphere name--at least not now. It is unclear how IBM's zSeries and iSeries platforms will play into this acquisition.

As we anticipated the company would do several weeks ago, IBM last week announced the Linux-only versions of the pSeries 630 "Regatta-L" servers. The Linux-ready machines are based on the four-way pSeries 630s, which use IBM's 1 GHz Power4 processors. The uniprocessor and two-way machines support up to 16GB of main memory, and the four-way supports up to 32 GB of main memory. (These machines offer roughly the same raw performance as the iSeries Model 820 processors using 600MHz S-Star processors.) On the Linux-ready versions of these machines, IBM is offering the pSeries 630 in discounted, preconfigured setups called Express configurations. IBM then strips out the cost of licensing AIX on the boxes (ranging from $1,500 on the uniprocessor to $5,000 on the four-way). The resulting machines cost from $15,777 to $37,184, and provide discounts off the list price for the same machines running AIX that range from 8 percent to 27 percent. The one thing that these machines do not have is a bundled Linux operating system. IBM is sending customers to SuSE to get Linux and support for it at first; other commercial Linux suppliers will follow suit in early 2003. At about the same time, IBM will offer logical partitioning on the machines as well, with one logical partition per processor.

Dell has announced that is has begun volume shipments of its first blade server, the PowerEdge 1655MC server. This machine can pack up to six vertical blade servers, each comprising a two-way Pentium III server board that is based on Intel's 1.26 GHz Pentium III processors. The PowerEdge 1655MC can cram 12 processors into a 3U rack form factor, which is twice the density of a 1U, two-way server. The base server blade for this machine comes with a single processor and 128 MB of main memory, and it costs $1,499. The blade can support up to two RAID 1 protected SCSI disk drives (mirrored), which come in 18 GB, 36 GB, and 73 GB capacities. (RAID 1 protection can be turned off for customers who want to double storage capacity but increase the risks of data failure.) The blade chassis to house the blade servers costs $1,799.

Hewlett-Packard last week added two more machines to its ProLiant line of 32-bit Intel servers and upgraded an existing machine. The new ProLiant DL320 G2 machine is a 1U form factor rack-mounted server that contains a single 2.26 GHz Pentium 4 "Williamette" processor. It comes with 128 MB of base memory (expandable to 4 GB) and can house up to two 80 GB IDE/ATA disk drives and costs $1,449 in a base configuration (presumably with only one disk drive). The new DL360 G3 server, also a 1U form factor machine, can have one or two of Intel's "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors running at either 2.4 GHz or 2.8 GHz and supporting the new 566 MHz frontside bus. The base machine comes with 512 MB of main memory (expandable to 8 GB) and has up to 291 GB of internal disk storage. The base DL360 G3 will sell for $2,599. And finally, the four-way DL580 G2 server has been updated to support the latest "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors, which run at 1.5 GHz, 1.9 GHz, or 2 GHz and deliver a 26 percent performance increase compared to machines using the "Foster" Xeon MPs. The updated DL580 G2 comes with 2 GB of base memory (expandable to 32 GB) and space for up to 587 GB of internal disk storage in its 4U chassis. With 2GHz Gallatins (each with 2 MB of L3 cache), 2 GB of main memory, 18 GB of disk, and redundant power supplies, the DL580 G2 costs $19,810 without an operating system. With four Gallatin processors, 8 GB of main memory, and four 73 GB, 15K RPM drives in a RAID 5 configuration, the DL580 G2 costs $42,724.