Intel delivers new Itanium 9300 processor 8 February, 2010 By Mark Cox

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"We are architecting this for the most mission-critical workloads in the world," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president Intel Architecture Group and general manager Data Center Group. "Intel is committed to delivering a new era of mission-critical computing, and we are delighted 80 percent of Global 100 companies have chosen Itanium-based servers for their most demanding workloads.

Skaugen emphasized the salience of Moore's law and its' doubling of processor power ever two years, to mission-critical computing in a webcast announcing the release.

"Intel is continuing to drive the economics of Moore's Law into mission-critical computing with today's Itanium 9300 processor announcement, more than doubling performance for our customers once again," Skaugen said.

Itanium's survival has long been questioned by some industry analysts, but Skaugen said that with over 14,000 applications on Itanium, "we think we've hit critical mass." While the x86 systems market a year ago stood at $32 billion according to IDC, and the RISC mainframe market at $ 22 billion, Itanium stands at $5billion - but that, as Skaugen pointed out -- is a billion dollars more than AMD's Opteron, and more than all SPARC architectures.

"This is a technology marvel," Skaugen said. "Never before has Intel put two billion transistors on a microprocessor." And that two-billion transistor 9300 series processor meets projected data growth need with twice as many cores as its predecessor (four versus two), eight threads per processor (through enhanced Intel Hyper-Threading Technology), more cache, up to 800 percent the interconnect bandwidth, up to 500 percent the memory bandwidth, and up to 700 percent the memory capacity using-industry standard DDR3 components.

As mission-critical workloads require high-availability features across all platform components, the Itanium processor 9300 series adds new reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features that extend across the processor, its Intel QuickPath Interconnect technology, and the memory subsystem.

The processor's advanced machine-check architecture coordinates error handling across the hardware, firmware and operating system, and improves system availability by enabling recovery from otherwise fatal errors. The processor employs the second generation of Intel Virtualization Technology to improve performance and robustness. Its Intel 7500 chipset can directly assign I/O devices to virtual machines, further boosting efficiency.

"Customers need a flexible technology infrastructure that can efficiently and quickly meet changing mission-critical demands," said Martin Fink, senior vice president and general manager, Business Critical Systems, HP. "Intel's Itanium processor 9300 series, combined with HP Integrity servers, helps customers achieve new levels of scalability and resiliency with advanced virtualization capabilities to meet those needs."

"Poulson," codename for the next Itanium processor, will add an advanced multi-core architecture, instruction-level and hyper-threading enhancements, new reliability features and more.

Future Intel Itanium processors in development today are being designed for socket and binary compatibility with Intel Itanium 9300 processor-based systems and software. They are designed to scale in performance and capacity through component upgrades, without software recompilation, so customers can continue to expand and adapt their mission-critical computing systems.

The Intel Itanium processor 9300 series ranges in price from $USD 946 to $USD 3,838 in quantities of 1,000. OEM systems are expected to ship within 90 days.