Intel and Itanium Partners Gear Up for Quad-Core Tukwilas

Published: May 28, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is always a bit slow news-wise around the Memorial Day holiday, and that was as good a reason as any for some of the key members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance to start talking up the future "Tukwila" quad-core Itanium processors, which are expected to start shipping to server makers at the end of 2008 and to appear in servers in early 2009. Another good reason to talk up the Itanium is that competitive dual-core and quad-core chips, many of them running the data center workloads that Itanium was designed for, are already on the market, eating up mindshare.

According to Joan Jacobs, the executive director of the alliance, 2007 was a pretty good year for Itanium, all things considered. And when I say all things, I don't want to repeat the 15-year history of the chip, which has not turned out to be the universal 64-bit architecture that Intel hoped it would be, but which has nonetheless found a home in 20 servers and a niche in the data center. Like it or not, Itanium is here, companies are building platforms based on it, operating system makers are supporting it, and customers are buying them. The Itanium Solutions Alliance, which was founded in the fall of 2005, has 212 members and Itanium platforms support nearly 14,000 commercial applications, which is up from 23 supporters and 5,000 applications back in September 2005. Through 2007, over 184,000 Itanium-based machines have shipped worldwide, with aggregate revenues up 30.8 percent and shipments up 36.3 percent compared to 2006's Itanium sales and shipments, according to IDC.

As you might imagine, with Hewlett-Packard being such and early and enthusiastic supporter of Itanium and basing its Integrity line and HP-UX operating system on Itanium, HP-UX is a big driver of Itanium machines. Jacobs estimates that about 40 percent of Itanium platform sales are driven by HP-UX, with Microsoft's Windows driving about 25 percent of sales and the open source Linux platform driving around 30 percent of sales. In many cases, multiple operating systems can be on the same Itanium server, whether it comes from HP or other suppliers, such as Fujitsu-Siemens, Bull, NEC, Unisys, and others. HP's OpenVMS proprietary operating system has been ported to Itanium in recent years, as have a number of other proprietary platforms such as Bull's GCOS mainframe operating system, and these drive some sales, too.

Sales growth for the Itanium platform has been steady in the United States and Canada, but growth rates are higher in other areas. According to IDC's statistics, Itanium shipments rose by only 9 percent in the Americas, with revenues rising faster at 16 percent. (That means companies are buying beefier machines than they were.) But in Europe and Asia, the growth is really phenomenal, even if the base of machines is probably a lot smaller. Itanium-based system revenues rose by an aggregate of 35.4 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with shipments rising 56.3 percent, which is a lot higher than in the Americas, obviously, and also suggesting that these are relatively young and smaller Itanium shops, which stands to reason given the spread of corporations around this part of the globe. (Europe has a lot more midrange companies because of the fact that it is many countries in an area a little larger than the United States, which is one country, at least on the map until you try to run for president. . . . ) In the Asia/Pacific region, which is undergoing explosive growth, very large companies are plunking down mainframe, System i, Unix, Windows, and Linux systems as they computerize heavily and consolidate data centers, and that is why the 45 percent shipment growth for Itanium machines drove 61 percent revenue growth in 2007.

Rather than maintain the Itanium processor in the standard packages for Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has created a special Itanium Edition that is essentially a version of the high-end Datacenter Edition that removes the infrastructure--Web serving and other jobs that companies typically do not deploy on Itanium servers because, to put it honestly, Itanium machines are designed for database workloads and are too expensive to run these jobs. Just like big RISC/Unix boxes, mainframes, and other proprietary servers are. And to that end, Microsoft and its Windows partners peddling Itanium boxes have added dynamic hardware partitioning and the Windows Hardware Error Architecture, with Windows Server 2008 Itanium Edition, and have also taken failover clustering on Windows from a "dark art" and a "pain point for customers," according to Ward Ralston, group product manager in the Windows Server division at Microsoft, to a situation where Windows shops on Itanium boxes can set up a cluster in five mouse clicks using something called the ClusterPrep tool. The Windows Server 2008 Itanium Edition has a per-socket licensing model and unlimited virtualization licensing, like Datacenter Edition, too. The one thing it does not have, however, is a Hyper-V hypervisor for virtualization from Microsoft, which is only providing Hyper-V on X64 machinery. All the Itanium server makers provide their own mix of hard and soft partitioning techniques for Itanium boxes.

The one generic hypervisor that is available for Itanium gear is the implementation of the Xen hypervisor that Red Hat has put into its Itanium variants of Enterprise Linux 5.1, announced last fall, and 5.2, announced last week. Parallels also supports Virtuozzo virtual private servers (often called containers) on Itanium servers as well. The alliance was talking up the fact that Sophos, a provider of antivirus software for HP-UX, OpenVMS, and Windows on Itanium machines, will deliver a RHEL 4 and 5 variant in the fourth quarter of this year running on Itanium servers. And of course, Sun Microsystems and Intel are working on getting an Itanium-optimized implementation of Java Standard Edition 6 out the door, and Microsoft has the Itanium version of Windows running the .NET Framework 3.5 guts of .NET, and is committed to get the 4.0 release of the framework out on Itanium processors at the same time as it delivers the capability on X64 machines.

To chase down more Itanium business, the alliance partners are focusing on the banking industry, where mainframes and proprietary minicomputers, particularly IBM's System i platform, is popular. The worldwide core banking initiative announced by the alliance is starting out in the Asia/Pacific region and will launch in Western Europe in the early summer, pushing Windows/Itanium alternatives to financial institutions.

The other purpose of the Itanium talk last week was also to assure existing and potential customers that the quad-core Tukwila Itanium is on track, which gives the Itanium a chance against dual-core Power6 chips from IBM running AIX or i5/OS, quad-core z10 mainframe processors, and any quad-core X64 box running Linux, Windows, or Solaris. And a smattering of Sparc iron and its Solaris operating system, too. "The health of the silicon looks really good," says Rob Shiveley, worldwide marketing manager for the Mission Critical Server Platform Group at Intel. Shiveley said the chip will make its early 2009 launch date in systems, but some customers will remember, of course, that they were expected about six months before that.

The Tukwila processor will have four processor cores on a single die, each with HyperThreading to provide eight virtual instruction streams. The chip will have a stunning 30 MB of L3 cache on the chip and 2 billion transistors, will have on-chip memory controllers, will use the forthcoming QuickPath Interconnect that is very much like Advanced Micro Devices' HyperTransport, and will presumably plug into the same sockets as future Xeons (a design idea for the QuickPath machines as well). Tukwila will be followed up by the "Poulson" and "Kittson" Itanium kickers, about which Intel has said very little. Tukwila chips should offer about twice the performance as current "Montvale" dual-core Itanium chips, depending on the workloads.

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