Xeon: Ease of use and flexibility
The starting point for this decision is the personalities of the two processor families: Xeon and Itanium. Xeon will be optimized through design and delivery to meet the broadest range of end-user requirements in both function and form. This will range from midtier workstations to database servers and from 8-way servers (with some niche suppliers offering beyond 8-way SMP) and eventually to single-processor workstations and ultra-thin dual processor "blade" servers. Environmental features such as lower power consumption, heat emissions, size of the processor and board, and its flexibility to be used across many types of systems, will be critical Intel design points.

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Our research indicates that in the short to medium term, Intel will continue to add features to the Xeon processor family that will improve its performance for specific users' workloads. This will include features such as Hyper-Threading technology, which enables multithreaded server software to execute tasks in parallel within each processor and results in more efficient, simultaneous use of processor resources. In addition, the Intel NetBurst microarchitecture will improve overall performance by increasing front-side bus speed (to 400MHz) and bandwidth (to 3.2 Gbps), memory capacity (to 64GB), and bandwidth (to 6.4 Gbps) and I/O speed (to 1.6 Gbps). A third level, on-chip cache, is implemented in the Intel Xeon processor MP, optimized for 4-processor (or above) systems.

Xeon will be optimized through numerous iterations to support specific system configurations. Principally, these will be workstation, midtier application or database server, volume departmental server, and ultra-dense Web server. It will be designed to support single- through 8-processor systems (with some niche systems going beyond 8-way).

Typical Xeon applications will target Web or application servers (e.g., Microsoft IIS, Apache), application layers of n-tier architectures in midsized deployments (e.g., SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft), firewalls, departmental or business unit databases, and general-purpose systems (not requiring 64-bit applications or ultra-high performance).

Itanium Processor Family: Enterprise-level performance
Our research indicates that by volume delivery of the Intel Itanium 2 processor in early 2003, there will be reasonable support from code-optimized enterprise applications and OSs (Windows .Net Server, Linux, HP-UX). This will give many users the ability to specify Itanium architecture for new server or workstation infrastructure. The choice of Itanium architecture will primarily be driven by application availability, but this may not justify its use given the comparatively higher price point and the ever-improving performance and function of the 32-bit Xeon family. Users will align deployment of IPF-based servers with the functional strengths of the architecture. These strengths revolve around five categories of application workload:

• High performance and technical computing
• Large data sets where performance would be enhanced by enabling large volumes to reside in processor cache and main memory
• Applications that involve multiple work threads where performance would be enhanced by true parallelism on the processor
• Data mining against large volumes requiring complex computations
• Workloads that require between four and 32 processors in an SMP configuration