Madison and Gallatin target high end

Intel has released its much-heralded 64-bit Itanium 2 6M and 32-bit Xeon MP processors, in an attempt to make inroads into the mid- to high-end server market.

Hewlett Packard (HP), IBM and SGI are among major hardware vendors to release systems for the 1.5GHz Itanium 2 6M and 2.8MHz Xeon multiprocessor, previously codenamed Madison and Gallatin respectively.

Intel attempted to address the high-end server market with its first Itanium release, but with little success. The market is currently dominated by proprietary chips such as HP PA-Risc, IBM PowerPC and Sun Sparc.

IDC figures showed that, while 90 per cent of server shipments use Intel processors, 50 per cent of the value is still coming from Risc and mainframe chips.

"Itanium 2 is really important because this is where the market has to take off," Martin Hingley, IDC's vice president of European systems group, told vnunet.com.

But he said that, with its improved performance, Xeon will be powerful enough for many customers at the moment.

"Everything has to go 64-bit eventually. It is a matter of timing. But Xeon is fine for most customers today," he explained.

Intel maintained that the Itanium 2 6M chip costs much less than proprietary 64-bit alternatives, but Hingley warned that converting applications and retraining is costly and could slow take-up.

Chips such as HP PA-Risc and Alpha, IBM PowerPC and Sun Sparc long ago moved to 64-bit to handle large database applications needing high memory addressability.

But Richard Draycott, Xeon product lines marketing director at Intel, insisted that Itanium 2 boosted performance by 30 to 50 per cent over its predecessor, partly through doubling the cache to 6MB. Xeon MP achieved a 10 per cent boost, he claimed.

"So far Xeon has been very much a low-end processor. Itanium 2 is altering that," stated Draycott.

"Now Xeon MP is suited to mid-tier transaction and data intensive applications, and Itanium 2 6M to very large applications. It will eat away at high-end Risc systems."

Among Intel-based servers announced this week, HP's new Integrity Itanium 2 range includes a 64-processor Superdome model, and a series of ProLiant models upgraded for Xeon MP.

IBM has released several Intel-based eServer xSeries systems including x382 two-processor 2U high and x450 4U rack-mounted Itanium 2 6M systems. Its range of Xeon MP-based systems includes the new 32-processor x445.

SGI's Altix 3000 supercomputer, upgraded for Itanium 2, is the first Itanium-based system to support 128 processors, and runs Linux.