14 DAY TRIAL // With all the rumble stirred by Oracle's recent decision regarding Intel Itanium server chips, the new Xeon releases may have raised some alarms, but Intel decided to dispel fears by reassuring customers that the former platform is not going away any time soon.
Some end-users may be aware of the tensions that arose between Oracle and HP, as well as all other suppliers of server platforms and software for them, not long ago.
The former, basically, stopped making new software for the Intel Itanium chips, something that the latter definitely did not like.
In fact, HP was none too friendly in its approach of the situation, bashing, so to speak, Oracle and urging its customers to demand that it change its decision.
Meanwhile, Intel said that Itanium was not going to die out any time soon, and it looks like it just got a new reason to enforce that statement.
Simply put, the Santa Clara, California-based outfit recently unveiled not just one, but multiple processors with 10 cores each.
These, along with other models, came as a very sizable refresh to the Xeon line and, being x86 units, could be seen as detrimental to whatever market share Itanium still has.
On that note, Intel said that the two architectures will exist in tandem, since Itanium still holds well in mission-critical servers, even though Xeons are gaining more RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) capabilities of their own.
“Instead of Itanium at the top and Xeon at the bottom of the lineup, we are going to have them side by side. With server vendors including Windows, Linux and Solaris now running on the Xeon architecture, there’s no workload in the world today that Xeon can’t handle," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s data center group.
“Itanium is on a two-year beat rate. Xeon is delivering up to 40% performance [increase], which is a world record. Since Itanium is not on a tick-tock schedule, Xeon and Itanium will leap-frog each other," he added.
UPDATED: Clarified the last quote so that it properly states Xeon's higher prowess.