Intel press releases confirm Itanium roadmap committed

Intel press releases confirm Itanium roadmap committed

Oracle’s press release dated March 22nd stated “..Itanium was nearing the end of its life”. Really?

I would like to share Intel’s press releases for those of our readers whom have not seen the recent announcements.

• On Feb 17 (only five weeks prior to Oracle’s statement above), Intel released Poulson, offering 3.1 billion transistors, the most of any current microprocessor, to advance the Itanium architecture for the next decade of mission-critical computing. Here is the fact sheet and Intel contact information
  
  
• Intel further positions the Itanium roadmap in the press release on March 23. Kittson is an officially committed roadmap product for Itanium beyond Poulson and is also in active development.

Interestingly though, HP Integrity has the #1 market share in Singapore. Read my blog at http://bit.ly/eaUdqj and it is disappointing to learn that Oracle will no longer be releasing new versions on the Itanium platforms. There are alternatives, and it may be worth porting the apps and databases to DB2.

One thing I would like to state is that the Itanium has earned a reputation as a good DB workhorse and in fact I came across several entries when I was judging the finalist for the ISA Award 2010 - one of the telecom operators had migrated from SPARC to Itanium and reduced the number of servers and CPUs and even managed to increase the throughput at the same time.

The Itanium chipset still has a great price-performance value proposition from a server point of view and I am glad that Intel is committed to the Itanium roadmap.