News

Intel Says Itanium Hitting Stride

After years of spinning its wheels, 64-bit Intel Architecture technology appears to be finally gaining some traction, according to Intel officials.

The Itanium 2 processor is on track to exceed 100,000 unit shipments in 2003, Intel officials say. Meanwhile, the number of commercial Itanium shipments is finally starting to exceed shipments related to boutique high-performance computing clusters, marking a crossover from cutting edge scientific applications to real business applications.

Aside from numbers, Intel is naming names of customers deploying high-end Itanium 2 systems. Since mid-November, Intel customers First Trust Corp., Fiat, SK Telecom, ING Mexico and CompUSA went public with Itanium 2 deployments. Most are running their production applications on Integrity servers from Hewlett-Packard, which co-developed Itanium with Intel.

Three of the customers are running their Itanium 2 applications on Linux, and two -- ING Mexico and CompUSA -- are on Windows Server 2003. ING Mexico, a financial institution that belongs to the ING Group, is using its Itanium 2-processor-based HP Integrity server to run its SAS-based insurance analysis operations. An ING official says the success of the program is leading another ING division, ING Canada, to consider migrating to Windows, SAS and Itanium 2 from a Unix solution.

Itanium technology is currently in its third generation. Intel launched its hotly anticipated Merced line in 1999, refreshed it with McKinley in 2002 and Madison this year. Next year, another version of Madison chips will come out with a staggering 9 MB of on-board cache.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

Featured

  • Microsoft Appoints Althoff as New CEO for Commercial Business

    Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella on Wednesday announced the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of the company's commercial business, presenting the move as a response to the dramatic industrywide shifts caused by AI.

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

  • Closeup of the new Copilot keyboard key

    Microsoft Updates Copilot To Add Context-Sensitive Agents to Teams, SharePoint

    Microsoft has rolled out a new public preview for collaborative "always on" agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing enhanced, context-aware tools into Teams channels, meetings, SharePoint sites, Planner workstreams and Viva Engage communities.

  • Windows 365 Cloud Apps Now Available for Public Preview

    Microsoft announced this week that Windows 365 Cloud Apps are now available for public preview. This aims to allow IT administrators to stream individual Windows applications from the cloud, removing the need to assign Cloud PCs to every user.