HP Gears Up for Montecito Itanium Shipments

Published: July 26, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While last week finally saw the launch of the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium processors from Intel, it is going to take some time for vendors to get enough chips and to qualify the chips in their new, modified, or unchanged product lines. And so it is for Hewlett-Packard the dominant supplier of Itanium-based systems in the world. HP has not yet set an exact date for shipping, apparently.

The word I heard on the street is that prior to the Montecito launch, HP was asking consultants and analysts to put their John Hancock on non-disclosure agreements that would run to September. And, having caught wind of this, HP's competitors--you know who you are--were trying to make much of the fact that HP was not able to ship its Integrity machines based on its "Arches" sx2000 high-end chipset and its "Titan" zx2 entry-level chipset on Montecito announcement day. No one is, in fact, surprised that a chip maker or a server maker misses its deadlines, particularly on high end boxes where absolute reliability is what companies are paying such a high premium for. In fact, I quipped to one vendor, when a company like IBM nails its targets with the shipment of a new chip, a new server architecture, and a new operating system all at the same time, as IBM did with the Power4-based "Regatta" machines in 2001, that is something that is really surprising and rare. With the Itanium-based servers, no one vendor is controlling the chip, server, and operating system, so qualifications are a bit trickier, too.

Brian Cox, worldwide director of server marketing for the Business Critical Systems division at HP, said that HP was expecting to begin shipments of new servers using the Montecitos "in the September timeframe." In May, the top brass at the BCS division, which sells Itanium, Alpha, and PA-RISC servers and which is a part of the Enterprise Storage and Servers group at HP, said that the company would ship Arches machines in mid-August to September.

If HP is hedging a little bit, it probably has more to do with marketing and factory volumes than qualifications, since the future machines based on the Arches sx2000 chipset have been qualified to run with the chip. Back in March, HP, frustrated by the delays in the Montecito launch, pre-announced the Arches and Titan chipsets about a year after first letting out some of the design specs for the chipset. The Arches chipset was launched back then with support for the single-core "Madison" Itanium processors; the Titan chipset, which was not launched, but just previewed back in March, will support dual-core Montecito, now called the Itanium 9000s, as well as the PA-RISC 8900 dual-core processors designed by HP itself. (Hmm. Wonder if HP had a hand in the naming of the Montecito family?)

Because of the expanded main memory support (up to 4 TB today with 8 TB around the corner in the largest Arches Superdome machines), a system crossbar with twice the bandwidth of the "Pinnacles" chipset, and other tweaks, the Arches chipset alone is providing a 30 percent performance boost relative to Pinnacles in chip-for-chip comparisons. Add in the fact that Montecito delivers twice the performance of Madison--at least at the 1.6 GHz clock speed with the full 24 MB L3 cache--then the top-end Arches box with 64 sockets (and 128 cores) should be able to hit at least 3.2 million transactions per second on the TPC-C online transaction processing test. This is about the same performance as IBM was getting with a 64-core Power5 machine using 1.9 GHz cores. With the Power5+ chips being launched on July 25 and IBM expected to get Power5+ chips into its biggest boxes running at 2.3 GHz and adding some large page memory support to the memory controller and memory boards used in the System p5 595 box. If raw clock speed means anything, then IBM should be able to hit 3.8 million to 3.9 million TPM with 64 cores, and you can get that Big Blue is trying like crazy to hit 4 million TPM. HP might even be able to push that high with a lot of tuning, too. Hence, the desire for extra time to do the real Arches launch.

Deciding when to launch a new server line in the summer is never easy, and HP, like many server vendors, tends to like a September launch for new products. That way, you can get three or four quarters of shipments in the final part of a year (when the IT budgets tend to be fatter), and set the stage for broader rollouts and tougher competition in the new year. Moreover, as Cox explained, even with Intel launching Montecito chips in July, a lot of the Western world is either officially or unofficially on vacation (at least as far as new IT spending goes) in July and August, and moreover, Europe literally goes on holiday in August. So rushing to get the Arches and Titan servers to market by the July 18 launch of Montecito would not have helped HP's numbers at all. Extra testing, qualification, and ramping up the factories for shipments in September will, particularly since HP's fiscal year ends in October. If HP can hit a September 1 ship date with Arches machines, it could see a very good bump in sales. HP Tech Forum is in Houston from September 17 to 21, and even if shipments start before then, the Montecito machines will certainly be the star of the show.

But, Cox says that HP doesn't want to focus so much on the processor and server hardware, and that the Virtual Server Environment that is at the heart of the Integrity machines as well as performance and availability are key factors HP wants to focus on. And you can't get a lot of screen time for these ideas at an Intel launch that has a number of other vendors--Fujitsu-Siemens, NEC, Unisys, Silicon Graphics, Bull and others--on stage, too. Which is why HP didn't even try. "We really want to make sure that we are showcasing what makes Integrity different, because we are by no means a whitebox vendor." Well, neither are the other ones mentioned, but you get what he meant.

In March, the rx7640 and rx8640 servers, which used the Arches chipset, were pre-announced with Madison chips, and they have been qualified to use the Montecitos. The rx7640 has one or two four-socket Itanium cell boards, and scales up to 16 Itanium cores. The rx8640 has from one to four cell boards, and scales up to 32 cores. At the Montecito launch event last week, HP showed off TPC-C benchmarks on a machine called the rx6600, which is a machine with a single cell board that scales to eight cores, which delivered 344,928 TPM on the benchmark test for $2.24 per TPM. This machine, which uses the Titan zx2 chipset, was configured with the Itanium versions of Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 and SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition SP1, and used the top-end Itanium 9050 processors, which run at 1.6 GHz and have 24 MB of L3 cache. This machine had 27 TB of disk (which was driven by a requirement for lots of storage per user on the TPC-C test that is questionable at this point) and 192 GB of main memory (required to drive such high transaction rates). The rx6600, when it is announced, will support the 1.4 GHz/12 MB cache Montecito chips as well as the 1.6 GHz/18 MB cache versions.

HP is also expected to announce an entry rx3600 server, which is a two-socket box and which is based on the Titan chipset. The rx3600 will use the 1.4 GHz/12 MB cache and the 1.6 GHz/18 MB cache versions. The idea is to chop a few grand off the price, apparently, by shifting to the lower-cache versions of the chip. Heat may also be an issue with such a large cache. Because HP hasn't announced these machines yet--and did not talk about them as part of my Montecito briefing--it is hard to say what the deal is. Suffice it to say, as far as I know, not every Integrity machine can support the large-cache Montecitos, and some only support 1.4 GHz chips as well as smaller caches. Bigger machines support the faster, large cache variants of the chip. The point is that, thanks to their support of 400 MHz front side buses as well as 533 MHz versions, the Montecitos can drop into the existing rx2620 and rx4640 servers, which have two and four sockets, respectively, and which are based on the older zx1 "Pluto" chipset.

Just to show that these machines still had some life in them, HP also showed off an rx4640 with only two 1.6 GHz/24 MB cache Montecitos in it (and hence four cores), and this box running HP-UX 11i v2 and Oracle 10g was able to hit 200,829 TPM at a cost of $2.75 per TPM. This box probably has about the same performance as the rx6600, in fact.

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