Brief

Intel unveils 5th-gen Itanium-2

Intel is on a high. First, it made the announcement of the Intel Core microarchitecture which received rave reviews on the power consumption and performance aspects. Second, it announced the launch of Itanium-2 dual-core processors or Montecito.

The launch of the fifth generation of Itanium seemed on the pragmatic side. Intel wants to position Itanium against RISC, and it is not a volumes game. Another major difference is that the company has lined up a slew of ISVs including i-flex, Infosys, HCL, and Ashok Leyland to talk about its solutions on Itanium.

Along with the Itanium Solutions Alliance (ISA) Intel has also announced the addition of six Indian software companies—i-flex Solutions, Lifetree Convergence, Mithi Software Technologies, Nucleus Software Exports, Ramco Systems and Subex Azure as newly-enlisted members of the alliance in India, and Intel’s continued support to the platform with five new products.

Riding on Moore’s Law, Montecito integrates 1.72 billion transistors on a single chip. It incorporates Intel’s Hyperthreading Technology, has an L3 cache and cache safe technology.

Merwin Fernandes, VP and Business Head, Finnacle-Infosys spoke about the trends in the banking segment and how issues such as scalability, consolidation and compliance were leading to a demand for businesses and IT systems that were agile and enabled reduction of costs. “There is a need to move away from legacy systems to infrastructure that is flexible, open and transparent,” he added.

Pallab Talukdar, Director, Enterprise Marketing, HP India said that HP had already shipped 1,500 servers on Itanium. He felt that the biggest advantage of this platform was that it supported multiple OSs such as Linux, Windows, Unix and VMS.

Intel also unveiled five new products in the dual-core Intel Itanium-2 Processor 9000 series. The dual-core Itanium-2-based systems target areas such as business analytics, data warehousing and high-performance computing. These products lower the energy requirements and double the performance (they improve the performance per watt by 2.5 times compared to the existing, single-core versions). All hardware OEMs that are members of the ISA will launch the new products later this year.

Ramamurthy Sivakumar, Country Manager, Intel Technology India said, “For every $100 million spent on Sparc or other servers about $45 million were spent on Itanium systems. Seventy percent of the global companies already have Itanium systems.”

—Shivani Shinde