HP Expects to Ship 'Montecito' Arches Servers by Late Summer

Published: May 2, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While talking up its Itanium server sales in the Asia/Pacific region recently, Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Business Critical Server unit, said that the company was getting ready to drop the "Montecito" dual-core Itanium processors into its new Integrity servers using the "Arches" sx2000 chipsets.

HP is ready whenever Intel gets the Montecitos to market, having already announced the Arches machines, which can also use the current single-core "Madison" Itanium processors, in late March. The Arches chipset provides 30 percent more performance compared to the predecessor "Pinnacles" sx1000 chipset used in the prior generation of Integrity servers, and does so by having more memory, faster memory and cell board interconnections, and a lot more system and I/O bandwidth.

The issue, of course, is when will Intel be ready with the oft-delayed Montecito chips? Marcello said that Intel is saying Montecito will be ready in the summer, which probably means late June, July, or maybe mid-August. The timing has to do with bugs and chip yields. "We'll probably ship systems in late August or September," explained Marcello. The reason why it takes so long is that HP has to qualify the chips and certify that the Windows, HP-UX, Linux, and OpenVMS software stack works properly on these Montecito chips.

Marcello also shed some light on HP's efforts to move customers using AlphaServer, HP 3000, and HP 9000 servers. He said that the top 1,000 accounts using this iron represent 80 percent of the revenue that HP derived from these installed bases, and that the retention rate on these accounts has been about 95 percent. Marcello said that the typical defection rate in the server market, regardless of architecture, is somewhere in the 9 to 12 percent range. So 5 percent, by comparison, looks pretty good. How is HP doing it, despite all of the slamming that the Itanium processor takes? "We are offering a lot of high-touch," said Marcello.

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