Intel's decision to begin shipping versions of x86
processors that are capable of 64-bit computing has slowed down the
adoption of the company's high-end Itanium processors.
A senior executive said, at the Intel Developer Forum in San
Francisco, "I would be remiss to say that the impact was zero, but
I would say that the impact was mainly noise and perhaps
confusion."
Abhi Talwalkar, vice-president and general manager of Intel's
Enterprise Platform Group, said, "I think it has set us back
several months."
Though Itanium has not met the aggressive goals Intel set for
it, the company's decision to support 64-bit extensions in x86
processors has not affected Itanium's competitiveness against Risc
processors from companies like IBM and Sun Microsystems, Talwalkar
said.
He made the case for Itanium's success during his earlier
keynote address at IDF. "The growth that we're seeing in
large-scale symmetric multiprocessing deployments, which is really
where the architecture is being targeted, has been phenomenal," he
said.
Application support has exceeded expectations, he added. "We've
already surpassed our (2004) goal ... of having 2,000 applications
ported, tuned and optimised," Talwalkar said.
After initially expressing reluctance to the idea, Intel last
February followed rival Advanced Micro Devices' lead and announced
plans to make its 32-bit Xeon and Pentium processors capable of
processing data in larger, 64-bit chunks, than they could
previously handle, and thus allow them to run 64-bit
applications.
Intel had been reluctant to support the 64-bit extension of x86
- a technology that it calls EM64T and AMD calls AMD64 - for fear
that it would hamper the adoption of the Itanium processor line,
which is also designed for 64-bit applications.
Programs written for 32-bit x86 processors do not perform as
well on Itanium as they do on processors that extend the x86
instruction set, and that fact ultimately forced Intel to develop
EM64T, analysts say.
Intel began shipping its first EM64T processor, a Xeon chip
code-named Nocona, in August.
Though Intel had positioned Itanium as the general-purpose
enterprise processing platform of the future, Talwalkar's
statements reflected the company's growing realisation that 64-bit
versions of x86 are unlikely to be displaced by Itanium, said
Gordon Haff, an analyst with industry research firm Illuminata.
"The reality is, to the degree that Itanium had any ambitions
for the 64-bit market as a whole, EM64T and Opteron really kind of
blew that out of the water," Haff said.
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service