Inside Intel: From Silicon to the World

Ending on Itanium

Since this isn’t a normal article we can’t really have a normal conclusion, so we thought we’d end on some discussion regarding Itanium and its future.  Recently there have been stories hypothesizing Intel dropping Itanium and IA-64 because of the platform’s lackluster adoption and niche market stance.  The fact of the matter is that the IA-64 architecture was aimed at a niche market from the start.  To put it in Intel’s own words, Itanium was necessary for Intel to design the next-generation of microprocessors.  You won’t find Itanium or IA-64 used in the majority of server farms, nor will you find it in most high-end workstations; IA-64 will be reserved for the most demanding of high-end tasks and by definition will be aimed at a very niche market.  The 16-way (and beyond) server market makes a lot of sense for Itanium and IA-64, and it is those markets that are predominantly Sun based that Intel is going after.

AMD on the other hand is taking a completely different approach with their x86-64 technology that’s going into Hammer.  Although the Hammer architecture will be made ready for extremely parallel MP systems, it won’t be going after the same market as IA-64.  Instead, x86-64 will be targeted at the majority of the high-end workstation and server market eventually trickling down to the mainstream.  In contrast, the technology and architecture behind Itanium won’t be headed for the mainstream desktop sector anytime soon.  Although some of the design innovations that made it into Itanium and future IA-64 CPUs will be used in the desktop sector, it’s unlikely that you’ll see EPIC there anytime soon. 

Note that this still doesn’t eliminate the possibility of Intel working on another 64-bit project that would end up competing with AMD’s x86-64 line.  If you only take away one thing from this article it should be that above all, Intel is driven by engineering and technology and not by marketing (although it may not always seem that way).  If going down an alternate route for bringing 64-bit processing to the mainstream makes sense, you can bet Intel will do it.

You see a lot of familiar names walking around downtown Portland

Until next time

We’ve been talking about doing this type of an article for months now and with it finally completed we’re hoping to do many more like it.  In-depth features on what goes on behind companies like AMD and Intel, ATI and NVIDIA. 

Let us know what you’d like to see and we’ll try to make it happen.