The Itanium Solutions Blog

I read with interest Ashlee Vance’s recent article in the NY Times, where according to sources, Sun is canceling its Rock chip project after 5 years of development work at a cost estimated in the billions. For all those Sun customers who have been patiently waiting and delaying server purchases in anticipation of Rock, this has to be a huge disappointment. Jon Stokes of Ars Technica further speculates that if Rock has fallen by the wayside, in the long run can SPARC be far behind? In any case we will all be following the latest developments from Oracle as they move forward to absorb Sun. In the meantime I encourage IT decision makers looking for a “rock solid” mission-critical computing platform to visit the Alliance site, check out the Itanium platform and hear from customers the positive impact Itanium-based solutions are having on their businesses.

Greetings! Intel continues our productive collaboration with Sun Microsystems on porting Sun’s J2SE implementation to Itanium® architecture, resulting in a regular cadence of Itanium® releases with constantly improving performance, security, and overall quality. Some time ago we released JDK & JRE 6u13 for Itanium, a security update release. Now I’m glad to attract your attention to the 6u14 release for Itanium which has just been made available at the Java™ SE download site.

The 6u14 release includes improved performance on a range of server workloads. This is achieved with both platform independent work described in Java SE 6 Update 14 Release Notes and Itanium specific improvements such as optimized memory copy routines and C2 JIT compiler enhancements. Also in 6u14 we enabled the Serviceability Agent on Windows/Itanium, with a few limitations described here. In 6u12 for Itanium, the Serviceability Agent was included in the Linux distribution only. And of course the 6u14 release for Itanium contains the enhancements and fixes described in Java SE 6 Update 14 Release Notes, but with a few exceptions related to new features: the Garbage First (G1) garbage collector and the Compressed object pointers are not yet ported to Itanium. We are working to enable those features for Itanium and the results may be available in one of the future update releases later this year. For more information about the release including command line options for maximum performance please refer to the Java SE 6 Update 14 for Itanium Release Notes.

Another important event which happened since my previous post was the JavaOne 2009 conference.  JavaOne is the largest and the most significant conference in the Java world, a gathering of thousands of Java developers.  In the pavilion, showcasing latest accomplishments in the Java technologies, we presented a demo devoted to Java 6 for Itanium® architecture.  An eye-catchy animation demonstrated comparative SPECjbb2005 performance on several J2SE 6 releases for Itanium including the latest 6u14, on the currently available dual-core Intel® Itanium® Series 9100 (code name Montvale) and the next generation Itanium® quad-core (code name Tukwila). The demo clearly illustrated substantial boost in 6u14 over 6u12 and the doubling of performance (for that workload) on Tukwila over Montvale.  The flow of visitors to our booth was constant and the booth team talked virtually non-stop in highlighting our results and the Itanium platform.  If you were fortunate enough to see this demo at JavaOne thanks for attending!

That’s all important news I have at the moment.  We are hard at work on our next releases and I’ll soon be back with more updates.  Until then, don’t hesitate to add your comments!

Now that all entries to the 2009 Itanium Innovation Award program have been submitted, I want to thank all of you who shared your innovative and compelling Itanium-based solutions with the Alliance. We received entries from 14 countries on five continents, again demonstrating the global success of the Itanium platform.

Check back with us on July 14 when we will announce the winner in the Humanitarian Impact category and the three finalists in each of the other three categories. And of course we hope that you will join us for the Awards ceremony during Fall IDF in San Francisco!

There are always good conversations going on over at the Intel Server Room. This one, in which the question “Xeon or Itanium?” is posed and discussed, is of particular interest.

The submission period closes today for the 2009 Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards. If your organization, partners, or customers are using Itanium-based servers to achieve impactful results, we encourage you to submit. For more information and to fill out the submission form, visit the Innovation Awards website. If you have any questions or need help in preparing your submission, please email awards@itaniumsolutions.com.