[rescue] Itanium 2

[Chris Petersen]

Haven't seen any prices yet, but got a hands-on look at the first HP Itanium
2 box (running HP-UX and Windows, think it was the XP-64 release) at a
user's group function recently.

The first generation Itanium boxes were reference boxes all essentially
built from intel componentry, including cases.  If you look at the original
Itanium workstations from Dell & HP, even the case was identical.

The Itanium 2 boxes, on the other hand, are going to be the first real
customer release.  HP, for example, is touting their own chipset which on
paper looked fairly interesting.  The box itself was a unified approach to a
workstation/server:  in the configuration we saw, it was billed as an
HP-UX/Windows XP-64/Linux workstation, but the same chassis minus a stand is a
2U-rackmount server that essentially replaces the A-class/rp2450 HP9000 box.
Built-in RAID, hot-swappable PCI-X backplane, hot-swap disks, etc., so very
server-oriented features for a workstation.  They expect the 3rd generation
of product (the first clock-speed bump for Itanium 2s) to show more product
differentation in this area.  Oh, and they were lucky to be demonstrating
the unit in a loud conference hall - the fans on the unit were loud enough
to make think it was a damn hovercraft...

Oh, and apparently there's still some debate as to what the first Windows
64-bit release will be called.  The ISV world has had it for a bit now
(we've had it internally @ EDS PLM for a while now, I understand), under the
moniker Windows XP-64.  The latest is that it will likely come out as
Windows .NET Professional.

ISV plans are mixed for the new Itanium platform still.  The performance
numbers we've been given internally show a *very* competitive box, matching
the latest US-IIIcu chips and beating current generation Alphas (EV6). 
Performance I think will end up being much closer to what they expected,
though remember that Itanium architecture performance is going to be heavily
dependent on compiler performance.  HP said that the HP-UX compilers (not a
shock) were the best at the moment out of the 3 platforms they'll be
supporting.  Internally, we've got no real plans for a product introduction
on Itanium until sometime in Q2/2003.  Oh, yeah, about the same time we
*drop* support for SGI IRIX...

Overall, I was surprised.  The boxes looked fairly competent overall, for
what was still essentially a preview product.  At the very least I suspect
that we will have some interesting workstation-level competition again.

BTW, the roadmaps show that it won't be until the presumed "Itanium 3", in
late 2003/200, that they'll match the dominating performance of the IBM
POWER4 chips...

Chris

-- 
Chris Petersen			  E-mail: havoc at apk.net
Systems Engineer, ExperTeam Services, EDS PLM Solutions



On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 03:44:17PM -0500, Shawn Wallbridge wrote:
> IBM was going to give us a loaner, but the rep said we would be better off
> waiting for teh second generation IBM machine (not Itanium 2). He was saying
> that all of the first Itanium boxes were almost identical (reference
> designs) and the next model IBM came out with would be an IBM design and
> would have more features.
> 
> I think the price on it was about $70k CAN for a quad 800 or something. We
> could use the 64bit memory addressing, so it would be nice to have one, but
> we haven't heard back from them yet.
> 
> shawn
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
> Behalf Of Joshua D Boyd
> Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2002 3:34 PM
> To: rescue at sunhelp.org
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Itanium 2
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 04:28:32PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> > On June 5, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > > I still wish I could get my hands on a regular itanium.  It is
> > > supposed to be a lot less brain dead than IA-32.
> > >
> > > http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/06/04/020604hnintelchip.xml
> > >
> > > But anyway, with the Itanium2, it looks like everything is going to be
> > > at least a 2 way SMP setup.
> >
> >   Uh-huh.  I wonder if it's going to fail as miserably as the Itanium.
> 
> Well, they aren't doing enough to get unix people behind them, and MS
> seems to have pretty much abandoned them, so possibly.
> 
> I don't hear of too many people using Itaniums.  I know that jahshaka
> team has one, but they don't seem to be turning out much.
> 
> --
> Joshua D. Boyd
> _______________________________________________
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