In this short video from HP you’ll see highlights of the Itanium 9300 Processor (aka Tukwila) launch event from San Francisco on February 8th. Kirk Skaugen of Intel introduces the new chip and its place in the market while Martin Fink of HP talks about the two companies’ strategic partnership.
Lorraine Bartlett, Vice President of Marketing at HP recently weighed on the Tukwila launch on the Mission-Critical Computing Blog. She states that the Itanium 9300 processor is a key component of HP’s next generation Integrity Servers and goes on to say:
She also asks her readers to think about how to build on the processor performance and turn it into bottom line business results.
On behalf of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I was delighted to see Intel’s announcement today of the Itanium Processor Series 9300 and the fact that this chip is now actively shipping to server manufacturers. This chip, code named Tukwila, has been long awaited by customers as well as ISVs and systems integrators who make up the extensive Itanium ecosystem.
Intel maintains that the 9300 will double the performance of current generation Itanium processors; great news for all who are developing mission-critical solutions on Itanium and look to harness the unique advantages of this next generation architecture. While the processor is admittedly late, to quote analyst Nathan Brookwood in a recent post: “in this class of market, it’s more important to get [the chip] right than it is to get it early”.
Intel has planned an extensive launch for this latest generation chip, read Intel’s press release, product brief, and whitepaper. I look forward to hearing reports from customers and ISVs as they begin to deploy these Itanium chips over the next several quarters.
As the information economy continues to expand, and the size and quantity of server rooms around the world continue to grow, the efficiency of enterprise servers becomes an ever more important facet of environmental stewardship.
Power consumption and utilization rates per server are two key metrics that chip designers and server manufacturers are keeping a close eye on. A recent article in Computerworld highlights how green initiatives can be more cost efficient, citing energy consumption and virtualization as examples.
ComputerWorld talked to Lorraine Bartlett, vice president of business-critical systems at HP, who said that moving NonStop servers to a blade architecture was a step forward in terms of performance, footprint, energy use, and power density. HP will continue to focus on energy efficiency and cooling requirements and future NonStop systems built around Intel’s Itanium Tukwila processor will offer 25% better performance while using 25% less power.
Steve Lutz, vice president and general manager at HP, said about virtualization and Itanium-based blades:
