The Chip That Didn’t Roar—Yet

Some did cheer and a few waxed poetic, such as Mark Horvath, global technical strategist for capital markets in the financial services group of Microsoft: “Intel’s announcement is like a long, cool drink of water on a hot day for middle-market financial services institutions.” Horvath argues that the Intel chip could put 64-bit computing within reach for firms that have “until now been priced out of the market.”

SunGard’s Mack Gill, director, Alliance Programs, also waxed a little when he predicted that the shift to a 64-bit architecture would be seen as significant as the move from 16- to 32-bit computing because of the gains in scalability and performance for applications crucial to the trading room. “We’ve been anxious for it to be delivered,” Gill says. “We’ve been working directly with Intel and their labs.”

Gill and the gang will have lots to do. The Madison comes with many promises: up to 30 to 50 percent greater performance than the previous Itanium 2 processor, code-named McKinley; system compatibility with the McKinley as well as two forthcoming Itanium processors—code-named Madison 9M and Montecito; and support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, HP-UX from Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Linux distributions from Caldera, MSC.Software, Red Hat, SuSE and TurboLinux.

More promises are due from Dell, HP, IBM, SGI and Unisys, which will offer a garden variety of Itanium 2-based systems.

In fact, HP’s Superdome server has won the attention of Raymond James Financial. The firm’s financial advisors—who broker transactions—are slated to get a data warehouse that runs against a 16-processor, HP Superdome, says Tim Eitel, chief information officer (CIO) of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based firm. The warehouse’s main components are a Microsoft SQL Server database, the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 OS and Microsoft’s .Net Web services framework, Eitel says. The warehouse, which debuts in October, will enable financial advisors to access ad hoc and canned reports—even remotely, he says.

Promises are also on their way from Sun Microsystems, which has to face off a new contender in the high-end server market.

Undaunted, Sun is readying its UltraSparc IV chip for an early 2004 launch, says a Sun spokesperson. Sun is pinning its hopes its network and throughput computing capabilities as well as its recently rediscovered software assets. Sun will also be touting multithreading capabilities. “Sun is designing different ‘multithreaded’ microprocessors optimized to address the specific workloads in [Web, application and data center servers],” the spokesperson says. However, a key element missing from the UltraSparc IV push is Linux support. The market will decide whether that was a wise move or not.

As for the underwhelming response to the Itanium 2, part of the problem may be timing and, as TowerGroup analyst Rob Hegarty suggests, the industry may be a bit blasé, nonplussed by the constant performance achievements from Intel. Firms may be more concerned with cutting costs, say Hegarty and others.

Still, it would be unfortunate if user firms became so blinded by cost cutting that they passed up the opportunity to evaluate systems that might finally live up to their performance promises.

I’d like to keep my performance promises, so keep me honest and email me with your thoughts at egrygo@riskwaters.com.

Eugene Grygo, Editor