Intel Says HP's Recent Move Won't Harm Itanium

Yet again, the Intel Itanium server platform is making the news, this time because Intel is speaking on the implications of HP's recent announcement.

As we mentioned here, HP decided to more or less combine the power of Xeon chips with what Itanium can bring to the table.

In other words, the Odyssey will include systems that make use of both platforms at once.

We're not going to go into too much detail about the project, since we have already covered that separately.

Suffice it to say, some people, Oracle in particular, have all they need to call this another hint that Itanium just doesn't cut it anymore, not on its own at least.

After all, Oracle stopped developing software for Itanium a while ago and has been saying that Intel and HP are keeping it alive artificially, despite it supposedly being outdated.

Intel might just expect this newest move on HP's part to draw comments in Oracle's favor, so it took a preemptive action.

“Customers buy Itanium-based systems for its support of resilient Unix operating systems, along with the combination of scalable enterprise performance and exceptional system reliability that is important to their mission critical needs,” said Radoslaw Walczyk, a spokesman for Intel.

“To date, Itanium platforms from our partners like HP have truly delivered the mission critical uptime, resiliency, scalability and overall capabilities that customers require – from the Superdome 2 platform architecture, to the HP-UX operating environment and the breadth of HP-UX based applications for the most demanding environments. We are very happy with HP announcement as it will provide more flexibility and choice for our customers.”

In other words, this isn't supposed to threaten 'pure' Itanium installments and Intel will continue to develop the processors for years.

"We remain to be equally committed to the Itanium and Xeon platforms, both of which represent our portfolio approach to bring open, standards-based computing to the mission critical computing market segment," Walczyk said.