A top Intel executive acknowledged significant problems with Itanium
but said Thursday that the company is increasing investments in the high-end chip family to brighten its future."I'm not happy with our sales figures, I'm not happy with our execution delays, I'm not happy with our killed projects," said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice-president of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group.
But at the same time, Itanium server sales are more than half of Sun Sparc server sales and a third of IBM Power server sales, and there are new customers and partnerships such as a major deal with computing technology supplier EDS. "Do I feel good or bad? The answer is yes," Gelsinger said in an interview at Intel's California headquarters.
Itanium may have grown more slowly than Intel initially expected and hoped, but it's no different than other major server designs, said Intel's chief executive, Paul Otellini. "We looked at the unit ramp of Power, Sparc and Itanium set to time zero. We're right on their curves from first shipments," Otellini said.
And transitions are necessarily slow when it comes to large servers, Otellini said. "In the mainframe space, you're displacing 10- to 20-year-old architectures; it's a marathon."
Intel and HP, the initiator of the Itanium project and its biggest advocate, have begun trying to take the offensive with the chip family. The new assertiveness includes $10bn in Itanium technology and market development spending through 2010. Half of that is coming from HP.
Intel has had troubles with Itanium — most recently the delay of Montecito, the first dual-core model and a product Intel says will double performance over its Madison predecessor. But the company has increased internal spending on engineers to speed up research on future designs — Montvale due in 2007, Tukwila in 2008, and Poulson some time after that.
After the agreement in which HP's Itanium design team moved to Intel, "We did a top-down look" at Itanium, Gelsinger said. "We looked at the road map — the embarrassment of Montecito — where we needed to be with Montvale, with Tukwila, with Poulson, and what does it take to execute."
Consequently, Intel has been hiring engineers. "We have not been more specific in terms of how much we incremented," he said, but it should help Intel with "better execution, credibility and predictability".
