Two More Peppier Itaniums for Two-Way Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Intel is hosting its eponymous Developer Forum in Taiwan this week, and the company likes to have some interesting new hardware to talk about at all of its big shows. To that end, Intel has announced two faster Itanium 2 processors in the "Madison" family, which it hopes will help spur the adoption of its 64-bit Itaniums in the two-way server space that is in many ways becoming the breadbasket of the server market.

According to Jason Waxman, director of multiprocessor platform marketing at Intel, the introduction of the new 1.4 GHz/3 MB cache and 1.6 GHz/3 MB cache Madison parts put Intel one step closer on that path towards its stated goal of delivering Itanium platforms that cost the same as Xeon platforms by 2007, but which deliver twice the performance.

The 1.4 GHz/3 MB Madison chip is available immediately, and it is based on the same 130 nanometer copper processes that Intel uses to make both faster Madison and slower "Deerfield" Itanium 2 chips for the dual processor (DP) server and workstation markets. The larger Madison MP (short for multiprocessor) chips also use a 130 nanometer process. This new chip replaces a 1.4 GHz/1.5 MB Madison, and Intel claims that the larger 3 MB cache can help applications deliver up to 25 percent more performance. With that 3 MB cache, the 1.4 GHz Itanium dissipates about 99 watts of heat. This chip is available immediately to Intel's OEM server and workstation customers, and Intel is also making its own whitebox rack-mounted servers available to resellers that want to just go straight to Intel for a box. The 1.4 GHz/3 MB Madison chip costs $1,172 in 1,000-unit quantities, the same price as the 1.4 GHz/1.5 MB part it replaces. Intel also still sells a 1.4 GHz/4 MB Madison chip for $2,247 each in 1,000-unit quantities.

The top end Madison prior to today's announcement was a 1.5 GHz/6 MB part that costs a whopping $4,227. But a new 1.6 GHz/3 MB Madison that Intel will start shipping sometime in May is going to give that earlier Madison chip, a so-called Itanium MP for four-way and larger servers, a run for the money. The 1.6 GHz/3 MB chip dissipates 112 watts of heat as it runs, a little bit less than the 130 watts that the 1.5 GHz/6 MB part does. The 1.6 GHz chip will nonetheless deliver 6.4 gigaflops of floating point performance and 51.2 GB/sec of cache bandwidth per processor, which makes it a very powerful chip.

The company has not tweaked the low-end of the Itanium DP line, and the "Deerfield" Itanium 2 chip that Intel launched in September 2003 running at 1 GHz with 1.5 MB of L3 cache memory is still the least power-hungry of the Itanium chips. This chip, at 62 watts of heat dissipation, is much more attractive for some dense clusters despite the fact that it does not deliver the best performance, mainly because at $744 a piece in 1,000-unti quantities, it offers pretty respectable price performance and arguably the best flops per watt ratios. All of the Itanium processors support the 64-bit implementations of Windows and Linux as well as the HP-UX and FreeBSD variants of Unix.

As 2004 was getting started, Intel said that it wanted to get the Xeon and Itanium server lines into price parity by 2007. A 64-bit Itanium core will deliver about the same performance as a 32-bit or 64-bit Xeon core on most workloads; on some workloads, the Itanium chip really excels, of course. But because the Itanium core is much smaller than the Xeon core, Intel is going to be able to jam twice as many Itanium cores on a chip as it can Xeon cores. This seems to be mainly how Intel is going to get Itanium platforms at a performance level that is twice that of Xeons, even those with 64-bit extensions. But Intel wants price parity per core between Xeon and Itanium platforms, so choosing Itanium becomes a no-brainer.

In 2002, with the 1 GHz/3 MB "McKinley" Itaniums, Waxman says that a dual-processor Itanium server cost about $18,000 with 4 GB of main memory and a 36 GB disk drive in the box. With the Madison generation of Itanium 2 DPs last year, the cost of a two-way machine with considerably more performance fell to around $11,000 with the same 4 GB of main memory and 36 GB disk. With the advent of the 1.4 GHz/3 MB Madison Itanium DP today, Intel reckons that server makers will be able to get Madison DP servers out the door with two chips and 4 GB of memory for under $8,000. (That is a machine from Ion Computer, which is trying to undercut bigger server makers to get a toehold in the game.) Machines from tier one vendors are a bit more pricey, so watch Intel's comparisons. Hewlett-Packard is selling an rx1600 Deerfield machine with Linux bundled on it for $2,100 with one 1.5 GHz/1.5 MB chip and 512 MB of main memory. With two processors and 4 GB of main memory, it costs $8,985. An rx2600 box with two 1.4 GHz/1.5 MB processors, 4 GB of main memory, and a 36 GB disk costs $12,320. Why HP is doubling the price of the processors in this box is unclear. But server vendors often modify heat sinks and other components so they can control the distribution of Intel's parts. This was the case with Pentium III Xeon and Pentium 4 Xeon parts.

These are the games server people play, and when Intel says that the Itanium platforms today are less than half the price of the machines from two years ago, you simply have to get the Ion Computer price on that HP gear (or a 33 percent discount) to make it true. This is, by the way, perfectly reasonable but the stats could be misleading to someone who doesn't read the fine print.

Intel is determined to push the cost of Itanium machines down again with the "Montecito" dual-core Itanium MPs and "Millington" dual-core Itanium DPs in 2005, and will reach price parity with Xeon machines in the "Tukwila" Itanium MP and "Dimona" Itanium DP chips (presumably both with four cores) in 2007. One of the ways that Intel will reach parity is by creating a single system board that can accept either Xeon or Itanium processors, which will be given the same pin outs in the 2007 generation, according to Waxman. These machines will use similar memory technologies and share other components as well. In fact, this convergence will begin with the 90 nanometer generations of Xeons and Itaniums in 2005 and 2006. By 2007, Intel will be well on its way toward 65 nanometer technologies, and if all goes well, DP and MP server board components will be essentially identical except for the Xeon or Itanium processors.

By that time, Itanium will have to have broken out of the high-performance technical market that is pretty much the main bastion of Itanium users today and gone mainstream, or something else will have leapt into the gap. IBM will be pushing its Power6 and Power7 processors by then, and if Advanced Micro Devices continues to gain traction, it will still be in the game and could end up being the main component in servers from Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu-Siemens. It is by no means a foregone conclusion that Itanium will win in the 64-bit generation. But it will have better than even odds if Intel can deliver twice the performance for the same price as a Xeon box and keep in line with RISC/Unix architectures and Opterons.

(For more on the future Intel Xeon and Itanium chip roadmaps, see "Intel Draws More Lines on Xeon, Itanium Roadmaps.")