HP Customers Meeting Another Itanium CPU

HP had some plans to renew some of its blade servers with the new generation of fresh Itanium processors from Intel. But it looks like the bid chip producer did not pay enough attention to the next version of Itanium, codenamed Montvale, as it seems to disappoint from the start. Just about everything is plain wrong with it, from the barely increased running frequency, just a tad faster than the existing 1.6GHz chip and to the minor improvements that are more suited for different revisions of the same chip and not for the next version.

As the new Itanium will arrive at the end of the year, HP will have to wait until then to refresh some of the blade server series like the BL60p, the lower end rx6600 and rx3600 stand alone systems and the higher end rx7640, rx8640, together with the Superdome machines. According to the news site TheRegister, HP is planning to release a new NonStop blade server with two processor sockets and a new "four-way Integrity blade with the chip" coming from Intel. In 2008, Intel is expected to replace Montvale with a new quad core version of Itanium processor that is supposed to bring major performance improvements, but according to HP, it will not be integrated into new systems until 2009.

HP will launch soon a new NonStop line of servers that will be based on the 8-, 16-, 32-, and 64-way architectures with two and four way lower end systems and that while IBM is rolling its own Power6 based servers with Sun's 16 cored Rock family of processors expected to come out in 2008. As Intel is delaying the newer Itanium chips, this had serious consequences for HP, Bull and SGI that needed the performance boost to consolidate their market positions. Since the Intel's Montecito server chip arrived last year, HP managed somehow to steadily increase its sale of the Integrity systems and while the company remains the only hope for the Itanium market, it looks like Intel does not really care about that market segment any longer.

HP is still lucky though, as the server market is not as volatile as the desktop and mobile processors markets and because the high end servers are more influenced by the software solutions available than by every new chip generation that may or may not make it to the end users.