Chipset Differentiators
Hewlett-Packard developed the Itanium® architecture specification with Intel®[38] as part of a grand partnership. The chipset that resulted from this combination of skill sets produced key differentiators that set it apart from anything else. One such differentiator is Hewlett-Packard's variant of the UNIX®[39] operating system, HP-UX. This is the only enterprise-class version of UNIX available with the Itanium processor family.
[38] Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
[39] UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
The second differentiator is the HP zx1 Chipset. This chipset will allow HP to make a strong move into the workstation and <8-way server markets. Also, it will make the architecture ubiquitous by moving into the volume, or 'mass computing' market.
Finally, the HP zx1 Chipset stands out from the crowd by setting some historic firsts. For example, this is the first chipset to support a 64-bit processor while at the same time offering high bandwidth and low latency at a volume market price.
This chipset also is unique in that it attains major five goals:
Achieves very low latencies and high-bandwidth throughput.
Achieves a very balanced design, ensuring that there are no bottlenecks from memory bus to the PCI bus across the entire chipset.
Achieves excellent economies, both economies of design and of unit cost.
Provides unparalleled flexibility in the low-end thanks to its modular design, allowing a number of different configurations to weight the chipset towards workstation or server use.
Providing the best setting to showcase the power of the Intel Itanium processor because it was specifically designed for the processor by the company who co-developed the processor architecture with Intel. This not only allows the processor to perform to the highest potential by keeping its pipelines fed with data, it also adds to the price/performance story of Itanium because it is a low cost design.