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IBM to Drop Itanium

Posted by Zonk on from the xeon-chips-have-the-power dept.

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."

9 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Stick a fork in it, it's done by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful
    No one outside of certain specialized environments that demand loads of floating point is interested in itanic. Flush the damn thing already and work on EM64T, will you intel?

    WTF does "The article also hints that IBM might start using Power in their high end server products" mean anyway? The processor is called POWER, and IBM already uses it in their high-end server products, like the ones that used to be called RS/6000. As for Power, well, show me a transistor that works without it.

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  2. From the summary: by Noose+For+A+Neck · · Score: 5, Informative
    "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?

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  3. I'll miss it by m50d · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Say what you like, but Itanium was a nice architecture. The compiler is the proper place for the optimisations, the processor should be left to do the actual processing. It's still the most efficient way I know to do raytracing or anything multimediay, and I predict there will still be a market for them for some time.

    On second thought, maybe they'll start appearing cheaply on ebay. That'd be nice.

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    1. Re:I'll miss it by Schweg · · Score: 5, Insightful

      With Itanium, Intel attempted to tackle a set of issues that isn't new, and other companies have tried (and failed at) before. It's hard to shift almost all of the burden of optimization, because it's a case of "early optimization" (the root of all evil). Optimization by the processor at run-time allows one to deal with data-dependent issues, and base decisions on statistics gathered by modern processors (such as branch history, caching behavior, etc). Intel made a good try at it, but ended up making a very power-hungry processor that exposed a lot of complexity to the programmer, and whose advantages compared to other processors on the market were not very clear.

  4. Getting leaner, IBM? by osewa77 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First they drop a PC line tha was not making them money. Then they drop a server line that's clearly not the future of that space. I think they're making some right decisions here. If the POWER platform succeeds, as it more likely would when resources are focussed on it, and it is accepted as a viable alternative to the PC platform, the ensuing competition would probably be good for all of us.

    1. Re:Getting leaner, IBM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, the reason that Power(PC) never made a dent in x86 is that IBM promised everyone that it would scale better and it simply did not. Furthermore, IBM themselves quashed cheap PowerPC workstations due to internal politics surrounding OS/2, never provided good chipsets to third parties, etc.

      Hey "Blame Microsoft For Everything" is fun, but IBM never seriously attempted to position PowerPC in the mainstream x86 market.

  5. Re:Itaniums are the worst chips ever by QuickFord · · Score: 5, Funny

    True, but they make a real nice keychain!

  6. Not accurate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  7. Re:AMD64 by Anarke_Incarnate · · Score: 5, Interesting

    AMD64 is the real deal. EM64T is a kludge that is mostly compatible with AMD64. AMD64 has better performance and better handling of >4GB RAM.