Processors Toolkit

Intel: Montecito or bust?

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64-bit,
AMD,
Chip,
Chips

Rupert Goodwins in San Francisco ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 09 Sep 2004 10:40 BST

Talking of virtualisation, what is the relationship between Silvervale and Vanderpool (virtualisation already demonstrated on client processors)?
Silvervale and Vanderpool have the same baseline technology, because we don't want to drive two different efforts from software vendors. There'll be specific enhancements for the server market, specific needs they have. But we want to keep that as seamless as possible, so the core software development work that companies have to do for that virtual machines. There'll be a base set of capabilities, a base architecture that's consistent across both and then you'll see a divergence, optimisation for client and server side.

How will the introduction of the Common Platform Architecture affect the dynamic between Xeon and Itanium?
The common platform architecture, in 2006, will have a common bus and packaging [between the two chips] but the processors will remain different architectures. So OEMs that want to can design one chipset that covers both processors, for all the multi-processor and multi-core configurations, on the common bus. We haven't released any details on the bus, but we're sharing it with customers and OEMs that are developing large scale chipsets.

Are targets being adjusted for Itanium now from those you had at the beginning of the year?
From the consumption standpoints, the consumption standpoint has been pretty good. The other thing we're very pleased with is the growth of large scale systems. HP's systems started hitting the market more aggressively earlier this year, and we're starting to see large scale systems from other companies with Itanium hitting the market. So this year, end user deployments and wins are probably 2x the pace of the last year. We have a goal of getting at least 50 of the global 100 deployed, and I think we're at 38 to 40 by now.

How about very high performance computing?
Intel architecture has taken that world by storm, with tremendous growth. 285 of the top 500 are now Intel. It's not where our primary focus is. That market is roughly six to seven billion market, but the server market is about 50 to 55 billion in size. It's a critical market, in that all sorts of interesting technologies are developed and incubated there and work their way down to the server market – clustering capabilities, scale-out capabilities are going to make their way from HPC down to business.

What about Mike Fister's [Talwalkar's predecessor, who left Intel last month] promise to drive the costs between the Xeon and Itanium down to parity?
That's about driving costs down through the overall cost structure, the commonality of power delivery systems, the chipset, other hardware, the common platform concept, these economies will help bring the cost points down. Right now we've got a very clear strategy. IBM's the target. We want this thing to be, and I think it's becoming, a two-horse race.