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Growing market share with Itanium, NEW STRAITS TIMES-MANAGEMENT

Posted on: Tuesday, 5 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

xfdws GROWING-MARKET sked Emerging Markets Datafile

August 04, 2003

NEW STRAITS TIMES-MANAGEMENT TIMES

MALAYSIA

ENGLISH

Growing market share with Itanium, NEW STRAITS TIMES-MANAGEMENT TIMES

Ferina Manecksha

ASIA WorldSources, Inc. 322 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE 2ND FLOOR, NE WASHINGTON, DC 20002 COPYRIGHT 2003 BY WORLDSOURCES, INC., A JOINT VENTURE OF FDCH e-Media, INC. AND WORLD TIMES, INC. NO PORTION OF THE MATERIALS CONTAINED HEREIN MAY BE USED IN ANY MEDIA WITHOUT ATTRIBUTION TO WORLDSOURCES, INC.

CHIP giant Intel Corp believes Itanium 2, formerly codenamed Madison, which is the third member of its Itanium processor family (IPF), is steadily gaining momentum since its worldwide launch on June 30.

This is contrary to general perception and analyst reports that IPF has been experiencing a slow adoption, which is expected to pick up with Itanium 2 that Intel claimed will deliver between 30 and 50 per cent greater performance compared to the previous Itanium 2 processor codenamed McKinley.

Besides performance, the company also claimed that it maintains system compatibility with the previous Itanium 2 and two future Itanium processors codenamed Madison 9M and Montecito.

According to Intel Technology Asia Pte Ltd's IPF marketing manager William Wu, the greatest uptake of Itanium-based servers comes from emerging markets such as China, where new technology adoption occurs on a bigger scale and at a faster rate because they are not burdened with legacy systems.

''IDC (International Data Corp) expects a crossover of revenue from RISC (reduced instruction set computing)-based processors to Intel Architecture-based processors this year, after which IA-based processors are expected to experience higher revenue growth,'' Wu told Computimes.

He added that IPF, which is part of a strategy to break Unix domination in the high-end server market, is being marketed to overtake RISC for key applications that have traditionally been running on RISC-based systems such as database, enterprise resource planning (ERP), high-performance computing (HPC), business intelligence and security.

''HPC is the most popular application to run on Itanium-based servers, although other applications are gaining momentum on all operating systems (OSes) such as Windows, Linux and Unix.''

Currently, there are more than 400 IPF software in production, with more slated for the second half of this year.

Wu said Itanium-based systems are priced lower than RISC-based systems.

As a result, this makes them attractive during the sluggish economic climate, where businesses look at cutting costs through consolidation.

Deploying Itanium-based servers reduces licensing costs while achieving high levels of performance, he added.

Itanium, Intel claimed, is designed to offer 48 per cent price/performance advantage over RISC platforms while an additional 10 per cent in cost for an Itanium 2-based solution brings between 25 and 30 per cent additional performance over its Xeon processor MP-based systems.

Itanium 2-based systems offer the best results for technical computing workloads, secure transactions, ERP workloads, and raw processor performance, Intel said.

The Itanium 2 processor also maintains software compatibility with previous and future IPF products as well as 32-bit applications. The 32-bit Xeon processor MP 2.8 gigahertz (GHz) is compatible with existing Xeon processor MP-based platforms and delivers up to 10 per cent or greater performance over its predecessor. It offers better transaction processing performance than comparable RISC-based platforms at half the cost per transaction.

Marketing efforts to push Itanium 2 solutions include enabling hardware vendors and software communities to provide training, porting tools to independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers as well as establishing solution centres.

''The recently established centre in Shanghai (which serves the Asia-Pacific region) is designed to demonstrate the viability of Itanium 2 solutions for enterprise customers in a multi-operating system environment on-site or remotely,'' Wu said.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific's business critical systems director Peter Hall said Itanium-based servers will lead the market over the next 15 to 20 years.

HP, co-inventor of Itanium, claimed it received more than 350 orders for Itanium-based servers within the first two weeks of the launch.

Its list of customer wins across the Asia-Pacific covers Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, China, Australia and Malaysia.

While IBM has introduced its x450 Itanium server, Dell also announced plans to release an Itanium 2 server. HP recently made available its Itanium-based 64-bit Superdome server during a rebranding exercise under the new ``Integrity'' name.

The lower-end eight-and 16-way Integrity processor models are due later this year and a Superdome upgrade with 128 Itanium processors is expected in January next year.

HP has touted that Itanium will gradually replace its own PA-RISC processor. The company expects revenue for Itanium systems to exceed that of PA-RISC by 2005 because Itanium runs across three OSes currently-HP-UX, Windows and Linux.

As for Open VMS support, it is expected to be available next year.

Copyright 2003 NEW STRAITS TIMES-MANAGEMENT TIMES all rights reserved as distributed by WorldSources, Inc.

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