IBM to Drop Itanium

Hack Jandy writes "Xbitlabs is reporting that IBM chose not to persue Itanium in their next generation server lineup because of the "market acceptance issues" of the platform. They will still continue with new revisions of Xeon servers, however. With IBM's investments in Power, I can't help but think the writing was already on the wall. The article also hints that IBM might start using Power in their high end server products."

Comments

From the summary:

[Noose For A Neck]

"The article also hints that IBM might start using Power in their high end server products."

What? IBM already uses POWER in it's high-end server products. What do you think they develop it for, anyway?

Re:From the summary:

[superpulpsicle]

http://www.llnl.gov/computing/tutorials/ibm_sp/

Here's a link to the history of IBM's processors POWER. This is one of the best sites out there IMHO, and it still seems mighty confusing.

IBM never had a good history of marketing their processors like Intel and AMD. They fight competition with raw numbers.

Re:From the summary:

[Henriok]

What? IBM already uses POWER in it's high-end server products. What do you think they develop it for, anyway?

No they don't!
the pSeries and iSeries isn't considered "high end" by IBM, they are considred low end and midrange servers. The high end is the zSeries and they doesn't use POWER/PowerPC processors just yes. Word has it that the future POWER6 processor will converge the three server lines on one processor platform. The eClipz project is tied very closely to this. "e" as in eServer, "l" as in Linux, "i" as in iSeries, "p" as in pSeries and "z" as in zSeries will.. eclips the Sun.

Not accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA and moreso the summary and headline is not fully accurate according to what I've heard.

What IBM has decided not to do is support the Montecito IA64 chips. Apparently Intel initially approached IBM about licensing the X3 technology for an chipset to support Montecito, IBM agreed and shut down their own program to develop a chipset and redeployed the resources, Intel came back a few weeks later and said they had changed their mind, would IBM build an X3 chipset for Montecito but by this point they had also announced that the next post-Montecito Itanium chip would be plug compatible with Xeon. Hence the market opportunity for Montecito is about 18 months so it's not worth IBM's effort to build a chipset for only that time.

IBM has therefore decided to continue to sell the existing x455 servers through this year, skip Montecito and support Itanium again with X3 when it becomes plug compatible with Xeon. That means that for about a year they will have no server that will support Itanium.

Two years is a long time in this business so who knows if anyone outside of the HP/UX install base will care about Itanium by then but IBM does have a plan for continued IA64 support if current trends continue.

This is not good news for Itanium but it's also not a complete cancellation.

Re:AMD64

[mczak]

In what way exactly?

I suspect the parent poster is refering to the IOMMU of the Athlon64/Opteron chips, which intels EMT64 chips lack. This might have consequences for some PCI (or other I/O) devices, the OS might need to use copy buffers if those devices want to do dma transfers to/from address space above 4GB.