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HP’s Itanium Promise

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DQI Bureau
New Update

If HP’s chief marketing officer (business systems and

technology organization) Roy Vondoorn, had jumped on the stage, spread his hands

and shouted, "I am the King of the World," the 450-odd developers

sitting in the auditorium wouldn’t have been surprised. As it is, he stopped

just short of that.

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At the HP Developers’ Conference in Bangalore this August–the

last stop of a five-city crusade across Asia–the mood was more than just

enthusiastic. It was positively aggressive. HP was pitching its Itanium

philosophy to developers and the message it was trying to give out was clear:

The movement from Intel Architecture 32 to IA-64 is inevitable. We are the

co-developers of IA-64. Ergo, we are the best company to go with when you shift

to Itanium.

HP told developers Itanium was more than just a new platform.

"It is the beginning of a whole new family of processors and a completely

different ball game. This is the true inflexion point in the market. Things will

never be the same again." Reason: apart from upgrading from 32-bit to

64-bit processing, HP is selling its faith in the new EPIC architecture

(Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) based on VLIW technology. EPIC is

different from RISC and CISC architecture used by most high end processors today

in that it relies heavily on the compiler. As HP said, "back in 1986, we

bet our enterprise server business on RISC. We are doing the same thing with

Itanium. Just, a little bit better."

What’s

Shipping
There’s already

competition for its Itanium workstations and servers. These are some of

the products already out in the market:

DELL

HP

  • Precision Workstation 730 with a 733 Mhz Itanium chip, 1GB of

    memory and an 18GB hard drive



    (Price–approximately $7,999)
  • i2000 Workstation with single or dual processor configurations
  • HP Server rx4610 with up to 4 processors
  • HP Server rx9610 with up to 16 processors

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HP went a step further and in announcing its product roadmap

committed itself to phasing out its RISC servers by 2004 (see box). PA 8600 is

currently shipping and HP told developers that the PA 8900 in 2004 is probably

going to be its last PA-RISC server. Though the company will continue to support

its existing PA-RISC customer base, the message is clear: we are moving on to

IPF (the Itanium processor family), and we want you to move with us. In fact, by

the time the PA 8900 comes to the market, HP would have already moved to Itanium

II, codenamed McKinley, expected to be introduced in 2002. And McKinley’s next

version, Madison, which is expected to appear in systems in 2003... The big

change in Madison is likely to be Intel’s move from 0.18 micron to a 0.13

micron. That and a better compiler will make Madison three times faster than the

Itanium.

HP’s pitch to developers was multifold–that it offers the

widest range of IPF-based systems (see box), that it would provide a

comprehensive range of transition services and finally, that it offers HP

OpenView management software for Itanium based systems. HP offers three

operating systems on the Itanium: Windows, Linux and it’s own HP UX 11i. The

repeated message throughout the conference was–"we have a platform of

choice strategy. The choice of development platform we use can be totally

independent of the deployment platform the customer wants."

The company is currently looking at targeting three major

segments–developers and ISVs, the secure Internet server space and the

technical computing space. But developers, more than most, are crucial to the

company as the range of applications available on the Itanium will determined

its speed of adoption. To facilitate this process the company is setting up

centers called Partners Technology Access Centers in six countries in the region–Japan,

Singapore, Korea, China, Australia and in Bangalore in India. Arun Thiagarajan,

president HP India told developers that PTAC centers would offer migration and

porting services, testing and validation, knowledge transfer and consulting,

apps assessment and technical assistance.

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Taking on the Competition

Though the mood at the developer forum was upbeat and more,

the printer king, server player and wannabe software giant is battling with

competitors at all sides. Firstly with other server players like IBM, Compaq and

Dell who’ve thrown their hat in with the Itanium. HP’s strategy on all three–beat

them with derision. The conference was liberally sprinkled with references to

competitors with one bottom line message: They are also there. But we are the

best. "Dell is good at producing inexpensive hardware but doesn’t have

much experience in providing enterprise-class solutions and services. Not really

the same class you know, " Vandoorn told developers. As for Compaq,

"they first offered Alpha as the next best thing to happen to the market.

Then they saw the Itanium and abandoned the Alpha strategy to jump onto this

bandwagon. Good for them actually. But it still leaves Compaq many years behind

HP in preparations."

Survey: Shifting to IA-64

What

was your main development platform last year? What will it be this

year?

Can

the Itanium make a big impact by 2002? In the RISC/UNIX servers

market, against systems from Sun, IBM and existing RISC systems

vendors?

The Itanium has captured

the interest of Intel IA-32 developers in a big way, but even among this

Intel/HP-oriented developer community sample*, it looks likely to have far

less impact on the traditional IBM, RISC and other developers. Intel and

HP’s challenge will be to draw them, for these are the ones working on

high-performance and big-iron enterprise software

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But HP’s biggest threat in the long run could be IBM, which

has announced its support to Itanium. But Vandoorn’s take on IBM,

"Frankly, they are a little confused. There is a group that doesn’t want

to go with the Itanium, and another that does. Finally, they have announced that

Aix will support Itanium–however, it is a different version of Itanium."

HP says there will be porting and apps issues between the two Aix 5L versions.

Sun has so far ignored HP’s barbs, choosing instead to

respond to the product rather than the company. Says KP Unnikrishnan, Sun India’s

Marketing head, "As Sun celebrates five years of 64-bit processor success,

we are welcoming Intel to the party, congratulating the company for its birth of

Itanium. It just goes to show that 64-bit architecture, which Sun pioneered and

perfected, is a requirement. Not an option." And, says Sun, "Of

course, we all remember who the pioneer of the 64-bit processor is."

Besides, Sun Microsystems is not really worried about the

Itanium just now, as early reviews show Itanium doing well at the high-end

scientific operations, but not so well on general-purpose business applications.

What Sun’s watching out and preparing for is the next generation of Itanium

processors–the McKinley.

Sarita Rani in Bangalore

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