Initial Itanium 2 performance benchmarks are impressive, with two CPU systems delivering about 40K tpm-C performance. There is good scalability to 4-way systems, with CPU systems from HP sporting 78K tpm-C performance. This compares favorably to 4-way Dell and IBM Xeon servers, which run about 35K tpm-C to 55K tpm-C. Most current 8 CPU Xeon systems offer about 60K-70K tpm-C, so the 4-way Itanium 2 is slightly faster than most 8 current-way Xeon-based servers. However, we expect faster Xeon systems by YE02. Indeed, IBM's recently announced x440 delivers 92K tpm-C on an 8-CPU 1.6 GHz Xeon system, but the benchmark was run with a Data Center Server edition of .Net Server, which will not be generally available until early 2003.

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Raw Itanium 2 CPU power is only 10-20 percent faster than Pentium 4 Xeons (or AMD) for integer workloads (SPECint2000, like Oracle), but 2x+ faster for floating point (SPECfp2000, like SAS, or technical computing), so a key for Itanium 2 general-purpose application performance is the SMP chipset (like HP's zx1, IBM's XA-32 "Summit," and Intel's E8870) as well as software optimization. In addition, Itanium 2 systems will be board-upgradeable to Madison (and perhaps Montecito), whereas Merced systems were not.

HP announced several Itanium 2-based systems (1-4 CPUs), and we expect IBM to release Itanium 2 systems by YE02. Interestingly, Dell has decided to skip McKinley and wait for Madison, the faster third-generation Itanium product due in 1H03. We note that, although Itanium 2 is about six months late, Merced was more than two years behind schedule. We believe that Dell incurs minimal risk by letting HP and IBM do the "missionary work" on the Itanium processor family, because current Itanium 2 demand will be limited relative to x86 platforms (though Itanium 2 demand will be far stronger than the initial Itanium Merced platforms introduced last year). Indeed, Dell's strategy of attacking growing volume markets with its efficient direct model will again be leveraged with Madison.

Business impact

With continuing performance and price/performance improvements, as well as growing server market commoditization, the server-related portion of overall IT budgets will continue to decrease.

Bottom line

Intel's Itanium 2 systems are a significant improvement over the first Itanium. Users should finally begin evaluating 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 servers, with testing and limited production use through 1H03. We expect widespread production deployment during 2H03/04.

Itanium 2 Servers: Now It's a Software Issue
First published September 18, 2002
By Brian Richardson

When will your company start rolling our Itanium 2 servers? TalkBack below or e-mail us with your thoughts.

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