Intel Intros New Itanium Processor; HP Unveils New Integrity Servers

Intel officials touted the myriad improvements in the Itanium 9500 chips, and stressed road map plans that extend through most of the decade.

Intel and HP executives disputed Oracle’s statements, saying the chip maker had a healthy road map for Itanium. HP sued, claiming Oracle’s decision violated an agreement between the two to support technology used by joint customers, and a judge this year agreed, ordering Oracle to continue to port its software to Itanium. Still, the litigation hurt HP, which saw sales in its Business Critical Systems group drop over the last year.

In response to a question, McInerney said the Oracle-HP lawsuit did not impact Intel’s thinking about Itanium.

“We were very clear during the whole case … we did not have changed plans before, and we don’t have changed plans afterward,” he said.

During the presentation, McInerney talked about plans for the follow-on to Poulson—dubbed “Kittson”—and the expansion of the Common Platform strategy. Currently Xeon and Itanium share common chipsets, memory and interconnects. With Kittson and the “Haswell” Xeon chips expected to come out sometime after 2013, the shared capabilities will extend to the silicon as part of what Intel calls its Modular Development Model, including design (memory, I/O and RAS features) and sockets.

Ric Lewis, vice president and general manager of HP’s Business Critical Systems group, said the company has refreshed its high-end Integrity line with the Itanium 9500 Series chips, including a new Superdome 2, three new Integrity server blades for the BladeSystem c-Class enclosure, and a new entry-level Integrity server for branch offices and expanding businesses that is highly energy-efficient.

Lewis also touted HP-UX v3, the latest version of the Unix operating system, which offers improved security and management capabilities, and new services and financing programs designed to make it easier for businesses to adopt HP’s Integrity systems. The improvements are aimed at giving businesses improved performance, high availability and total cost of ownership in their high-end servers.

In addition, like Intel, HP also has a plan under way to more closely align its Itanium- and x86-based ProLiant servers. Project Odyssey, announced in November 2011, is designed to enable businesses to run mission-critical systems on both Itanium-based Integrity servers and Xeon-based ProLiants in the same enclosure.

Intel officials said there are six Itanium customers, including HP, Bull, NEC, Hitachi, Huawei Technologies and Inspur. Inspur CTO Hu Leijun pointed to Itanium’s RAS features, performance, pin compatibility with Tukwila and road map as reasons for adopting the platform for its K1 server.

“We can go forward for years,” Leijun said during the event.