Fall IDF 2005 - Day 2: Pat Gelsinger Reveals Intel's Server Plans

A bit on Itanium

As his final topic, Pat Gelsinger made sure to continue to pump Itanium 2 as a platform with life and Intel's support.

Pat talked a bit about Montecito and its expected performance relative to IBM's Power5 processor:

He also demonstrated the uses of Itanium 2, such as oil excavation and how it can impact the search for underground fossil fuels. According to SGI and Halliburton, each hole they drill in the ground for oil excavation costs approximately $100M. With earlier systems their hit rate on correctly placing these expensive holes in the ground was a mere 20%, but with the most recent Itanium 2 SGI systems that hit rate has blossomed to 70%.

Pat was also proud to announce that HP's long running Itanium 2 server is now capable of 99.99999% uptime, averaging no more than 3 seconds of downtime per year.

The bit on Itanium 2 concluded with a shot of a handful of Itanium servers. While Pat tried his best to convince the crowd that Itanium wasn't dead, there was little talk about the future of the platform and how it is going to survive these next few years as Intel's x86 architecture improves.