Itanium shipments begin to slip
Published: 02 Mar 2001 08:50 GMT
Servers incorporating Intel's Itanium processor may hit the market at a more gradual pace than earlier anticipated, according to the company.
In a keynote address yesterday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, Mike Fister, general manager of the enterprise platforms group, said manufacturers would begin shipments of Itanium-based computers in the second quarter -- but that "broader deployment" will happen in the second half of 2001.
In July, Intel had said "general availability" of Itanium-based computers would be in the first half of 2000.
Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood said the new schedule is "stretching" earlier announcements of availability. "At every stage, nothing on this programme has happened as early as anybody expected," he said.
Intel's Fister said computer manufacturers will unveil Itanium-based systems over a period of months. For example, IBM may introduce a Linux machine early, while Hewlett-Packard might unveil a system with its own HP-UX operating system a little later in the year, he said.
Intel is in the middle of a years-long process to convert its power in the desktop computer processor market into similar dominance in the server world. The Itanium processor is Intel's flagship -- albeit a battered one -- in this effort.
While Intel's Pentium chips are immensely popular for lower-end servers, the chipmaker has yet to displace the central processing units made by competitors Sun Microsystems, Compaq Computer, HP, IBM and SGI for high-end machines.
Even Intel acknowledges that Itanium's second-generation successor, codenamed McKinley, will probably be more useful to customers than its predecessor.
During his keynote address, Fister said that although Itanium is useful for some e-commerce tasks, many customers will wait for McKinley to run high-end business software -- such as that from SAP or Siebel Systems.
Brookwood expects the delay between McKinley prototypes and shipping products to be less than the delays between Itanium versions. The reason: much of the difficulty of unveiling Itanium has been in preparing software and programming tools for the radically new chip design. That work won't have to be reproduced for McKinley, the analyst said.
"If McKinley stays on target, the period between pilot and platform release will be considerably shorter because the software will have been shaken out a bit," Brookwood said.
See photos of Itanium's second-generation successor, codenamed McKinley
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