Guide to Intel Itanium Processors

Intel Itanium processors help scale and adapt enterprise server infrastructure
By Phillip T. Stephens

The Intel Itanium microprocessor is a 64-bit designed for use with enterprise servers and high-performance systems. Unlike x86 Intel processors, the Itanium processors make decisions about which instructions to process at the compiler level.

Because Itanium processors by Intel aren’t proprietary; they tend to be cost-competitive and allow consolidation of multiple operating systems on the same server. As a consequence, providers of Intel Itanium processors offer your business a number of advantages for upgrading and adapting your enterprise infrastructure.

1. The Intel Itanium processor delivers scalable performance for computation intensive workloads linking up to 512 processors and a petabyte of RAM.

2. Intel Itanium processor providers ship the chips with commercial off-the-shelf hardware to quickly meet mission critical needs.

3. Intel Itanium processors support both 32 and 64 bit applications, which allows you to tailor your system to your enterprise needs.

Action Steps

The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Develop and expand your enterprise network with off-the-shelf Intel Itanium servers Any upgrade can improve your business' ability to keep on top of data intensive workloads, but servers designed for the latest Itanium processors by Intel tend to better support their power needs and data pipelines.

I recommend: Providers of Intel Itanium processors include Hewlett Packard, who developed the Itanium chip in partnership with Intel. HP’s Superdrome servers balance high performance with flexibility, security and manageability and support a variety of Unix, Windows and Linux operating systems and software. Supermicro’s 1U Itanium platforms offer a lower cost alternative with a 128-bit bus system architecture.

Purchase Intel Itanium processors to upgrade your older servers and motherboards Even older Itaniums can't match the speed of the newer Itanium chips, which clock in at more than 1.6. If your budget is limited you can still upgrade older servers and motherboards with processors and server chasses from a number of suppliers of Intel Itanium processors.

I recommend: Intel’s Itanium 2 1.6 GHz chip with 6 MB tray offers mainframe class performance with extensive error correcting code. Intel also offers a server chassis with a capacity of up to four processors. You can find Intel Itanium processors at Intel’s website.

Upgrade or sidegrade to software tailored specifically to the Intanium processor The best way to maximize server performance is to upgrade or sidegrade your applications to versions written to work specifically with the Itanium compiler, especially database applications where search speed is critical to finding the right recods. While Itanium processors support 32 bit applications, you will get the best performance with system specific software.

I recommend: Oracle’s Enterprise Edition database for Itanium processors comes with site wide licensing or individual media pack licenses for smaller businesses. Microsoft’s SQL Server Enterprise Edition Itanium-64 was designed to run on Window’s 64 bit servers. Novell also ships an Itanium version of their SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 which can be easily deployed on any Linux servers on your network.

Tips & Tactics

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

Intel released a version of the Itanium chip, the Montvale, in 2007, but reviews have been mixed. While the chip seems to be a definite improvement it didn't deliver all of the promised features.
For all of its virtues, the Itanium lags behind competitors in sales, including the SPARC, IMB POWER and AMD's 64 bit superset of their x86 chip.