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April 18th, 2011, 15:12 GMT · By

Intel Itanium Engineers Leave to Work on Xeon

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Intel makes changes to Itanium and Xeon development teams
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With the mild to serious scandal revolving around Intel's Itanium server platform and oracle's stance on it, any information on the subject is scouted out, and this is precisely what a recent report deals with.

The past month has been filled with reports and official notifications on Oracle's HP's and Intel's part regarding the Itanium server processor platform.

Oracle gave up on the chips, while HP took offense to it, as did its customers, who demanded that Oracle rethink its decision.

Intel said it would keep supporting Itanium for years, but also created new Xeon chips that, all in all, are better in almost, if not every, aspect.

Some questions arose as to why Intel is so determined to keep up with both server solutions, as the Xeon's existence and performance was seen as a reason for the phasing out of Itanium (which, again, is not happening).

Now, the folks over at X-bit Labs say that Intel has actually been making changes to its development teams for both processors.

More specifically, it has been reappointing engineers from the Itanium teams into those of Xeon development.

"Nearly all the Itanium engineers, save a small development team working on Poulson and then rotating over to Kittson, have been redeployed on Xeon-related projects," said person with knowledge of the situation, who wanted to remain anonymous.

"Intel does have few more tricks up their sleeve with respect to Itanium, but with Xeon getting stronger and more capable.”

Itanium chips have, as most pressing concern, per-core performance, since most UNIX applications ran by them were written back in 1970s – 1980s so they rely on high clocks.

The server technologies that the Santa Clara, California-based company is developing will work on both series of chips, but Xeon still has many advantages over the other, so one might say it does make sense for this employment shift.
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Comment #1 by: Kaiser on 21 Jun 2011, 14:46 UTC reply to this comment

"Itanium chips have, as most pressing concern, per-core performance, since most UNIX applications ran by them were written back in 1970s – 1980s so they rely on high clocks."

The sense of this sentence is unclear.

Are you trying to say the relative low clock of the Itanium vs. the Xeon and the inablity for the Itanium to use its larger issue width to introduce enough local and gobal parallelism into legacy code is the problem?

Comment #1.1 by: Pop Sebastian on 21 Jun 2011, 14:59 GMT

The best Tukwila Itanium is a quad-core chip of 1.73 GHz (1.86 in Turbo Boost) while 32nm westmere Xeons run at up to 2.4 GHz. Moving on, Xeon will start to get more and more cores per chip, plus better speeds, since applications are getting better at using more cores at once.

UNIX applications from that far back aren't particularly versed in multi-core running, so Itanium would have an advantage if it had a higher clock speed, but it doesn't, hence why various factions, like Oracle, think its time is over.

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