Intel, HP Unveil Next-Gen Itanium Chips, Enhanced Integrity Servers

Intel’s newest high-end Itanium processor, formerly code-named Poulson, offer significant improvements in performance, scalability and energy efficiency. It also holds 3.1 billion transistors.

Among the key enhancements to the Itanium 9500 is a doubling of the number of processing cores, from four to eight, over the current Itanium 9300 “Tukwila” chips. In addition, the Poulson chips offer twice the instruction throughput, 8 percent less power consumption than the Itanium 9300 processors, and 80 percent reduced power in each core when idling.

With the Itanium 9500, Intel is advancing its Common Platform strategy for bringing its Itanium and Xeon platforms closer together. The newest part of the strategy includes Intel’s Modular Development Model, which brings it to the silicon level.

HP refreshed its high-end Integrity line of servers with Intel’s new Itanium 9500 chips, including its Superdome 2 system, which will come with new blades and greater high availability, a key consideration for mission-critical workloads. The upgraded Superdome 2 offers a boost in performance, scalability and reliability.

HP also is bringing the new Poulson chips to three Integrity server blades for the BladeSystem c-Class enclosure, including the BL890c i4, which offers up to eight sockets. The servers can fully isolate workloads and protect data integrity through electrically isolated hard-partitioning, and use 21 percent less power with new low-voltage DIMMs, or dual in-line memory modules.

The Poulson-powered, energy-efficient Integrity rx2800 i4 server is aimed at branch offices or businesses that are expanding, according to HP officials.

Along with rolling out the upgraded Integrity servers, HP also offered enhancements to its high-end HP-UX v3 Unix operating system that improves security and management to speed threat detection and optimized resource utilization.

Bull has leveraged Intel’s Itanium platform for its high-end novascale gcos servers for several years, and is planning to release a new Itanium 9500-based system later this month.

Inspur, a Chinese systems maker, will use Intel’s new Itanium 9500 chips in its 32-socket K1 computer. The system will offer up to 256 cores and 4 terabytes of memory. Inspur officials said the RAS features in the chip, along with its pin compatibility with the current Tukwila Itaniums and road map for future chips convinced them to embrace the Poulson processors for the K1.