SCIENCE

The Itanium Solution Alliance's $10 billion investment in Itanium research, development and marketing has raised concerns from independent IT analyst Joe Clabby. A Clabby Analytics report states a primary concern that Itanium slippage and resulting slow innovation cycle is having on the high-end of the market in the High Performance Computing space. The free 6-page Clabby Analytics research brief, "$10 Billion More on Itanium: Is This a Wise Investment?", explores: What Itanium architecture is; How it is currently positioned in the microprocessor marketplace; How the Itanium Solutions Alliance hopes to reinvigorate Itanium; Why this move is so crucial at this juncture; and, What the chances are that this reinvestment effort will succeed. We suggest you have a look at Clabby's free report at the Valley View Ventures Web site. Findings in the report include: - Information technology (IT) buyers have already spoken with their wallets and have embraced Intel’s and AMD’s hybrid 32-/64-bit microprocessors as the path to use when migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit computing. Itanium, with its lackluster 32-bit performance bucks this trend; - Intel’s strategic 64-bit microprocessor architecture really appears to be its Xeon chip set. Xeon is the chipset on which much of Intel’s advanced microprocessor functionality appears to arrive upon first (with features such as advanced power management, threading, etc.). And Intel has recently been meeting-or-beating its Xeon roadmap dates (as evidenced by Xeon dual-core technology coming in way ahead of schedule) -- unlike Itanium which often slips-and-slides release dates while dropping or sliding important functionality; - Itanium systems makers could be in serious trouble if x86-based Xeon- and Opteron-class clustered servers (which now support multiple cores delivering even more computing power than ever) keep pushing their way into the midrange and high-end of the commercial computing marketplace.