***New Processors Drive Lower Cost, Entry-Level Intel Itanium
2-Based Systems
Intel Developer Forum
April 13, 2004
Intel Corporation announced two Intel Itanium 2 processors.
Servers based on the new processors are approximately 28 percent
lower in price and up to 25 percent higher performing than
previous dual processor Itanium 2-based servers.
The new processors broaden the Itanium processor family support
of lower-cost server solutions for front-end applications and
complement existing Itanium 2-based systems in large scale
deployments. A wide range of Itanium 2-based dual processor
servers are offered by more than 50 system manufacturers
worldwide.
The price/performance improvements of these new processors are
the next step toward achieving Intel's goal of delivering Itanium
2-based systems with up to twice the performance as Intel(R)
Xeon(TM) processor based systems for the same system cost in
2007.
Intel has two server architectures, which makes up approximately
85 percent of the server market segment share. The Itanium 2
processor family is targeted at business critical enterprise
servers and technical computing clusters while the Intel Xeon
processor family is broadly used for general purpose IT
infrastructure.
Audi AG, the international high-quality car manufacturer,
recently switched from RISC-based servers to HP Integrity dual
processor servers running Itanium 2 processors.
The Itanium 2 processor at 1.40 GHz with 3 MB level three (L3)
cache is available worldwide today and the Itanium 2 processor at
1.6 GHz with 3 MB L3 cache is expected to be available worldwide
in May. Both processors enable systems for technical computing
clusters and entry-level, front-end enterprise systems. In
addition, Intel offers to manufacturers a rack-optimized, dual
processor Intel server platform for both of these new Itanium 2
processors.
The Itanium 2 processor at 1.40 GHz with 3MB of cache improves
the performance up to 25 percent over the Itanium 2 processor at
1.40 GHz with 1.5 MB of cache. Furthermore it delivers up to
twice the price/performance of comparable RISC-based systems. The
increased performance will enhance the speed and efficiency of
technical computing applications such as computer aided
engineering (CAE), which enables faster product design and more
accurate simulations.
The Itanium 2 processor at 1.60 GHz with 3MB of cache delivers
outstanding floating point performance per compute node,
resulting in an industry-leading DP performance based on Linpack
measurements (or floating point operations per second).
New dual processor systems are available from a variety of system
manufacturers including Bull, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HCL, IBM,
Kraftway, Lenovo, Maxdata, Samsung, and Transtec AG.
http://www.intel.com/
Wave Issue 0414 /16/2004 Article 4-01