Intel unveils the Itanium 2 and new Xeon MP processors

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 30 Jun 2003 at 13:40

Intel has released the Itanium 2 processor and new Xeon MP (multi-processor) chips, designed for large-scale computing.

Codenamed 'Madison' the new 64-bit Itanium, features 6MB of integrated level three (L3) cache running at up to 1.5GHz. The heavy weight processor is designed to drive the huge databases and data mining applications that underpin today's enterprise applications, as well as the more traditional number crunching R&D performed in academic research environments.

Intel expects the likes of Dell, HP, and IBM to help double the number of servers and workstations based on the Itanium this year. The company says there will be more than 40 two- and four-processor systems on the market. And it expects more than 10 'big-iron' systems involving eight or more processors.

Richard Dracott, Group Marketing Director of Intel's Enterprise Products Group, emphasised the scalability of the Itanium 2, citing the support for parallelism within the architecture, such as Hyper-Threading, and the considerably larger cache sizes. 'It eclipses anything else out there,' he said.

So how far does the Itanium 2 scale? Systems supporting the new chip include a 64-processor Integrity Superdome server from HP and a server from SGI with 128 or more processors, the Altix 3000. There is even a 416-processor system from Sara.

John Flemming, SGI's Marketing Manager, told us that there was massive scalability for Linux systems based on the Itanium. With a maximum of 64 processors for each server, SGI's NUMA (non-uniform memory access) architecture enables one application to run across the resources of all the clusters in a system. He said 1 terabyte of data was the addressing limit that constrained the systems.

Intel's Dracott was relaxed about the current spat between SCO and IBM affecting Linux support for Itanium 2. He said he saw 'no real change in the behaviour of the market, and - from feedback received - no likelihood of change.'

The Xeon MP, previously codenamed Gallatin, now runs at speeds of up to 2.8GHz with up to 2MB of integrated level three (L3) cache although the system bus for the 32-bit processor remains at 400MHz. Intel claims a ten per cent increase in performance on previous Xeon models.

Both the Xeon and Itanium are server processors. The heavier-duty 64-bit Itanium is aimed at the back-end of the enterprise, powering databases and ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems. The lower-cost 32-bit Xeon is more aimed at front- and mid-tier enterprise computing, such as Web processing and some high-performance computing

'The combination of our two enterprise architectures has addressed the diverse needs of enterprise computing from top to bottom,' said Intel chief Paul Otellini, president and COO.

An Itanium 2 running at 1.5GHz with 6MB of L3 cache will set up back $4,226. Running at 1.4GHz with 4MB of L3 cache, it costs $2,247, and with 3MB of cache running at 1.3GHz it costs $1,338.

The Xeon MP running at 2.8GHz (2MB of L3 cache) is priced at $3.692, the 2.5GHz (1MB) model $1,980 and the 2GHz (1MB) $1,177.

As always, prices are based on 1,000-unit quantities.