Beyond Speed and onto Capabilities

Paul Otellini, Intel's Chief Operations Officer, probably said it best when he spoke about the changing dynamic that drives the need for Itanium and its processor family. “With Itanium the definition somewhat changes because it's not about megahertz anymore, it's about all of the functionality together.”

The standard speed benchmark, touted by computer stores and resellers alike, has been speed as measured in 'megahertz'. And it is true that for most architectures in the last two decades, the megahertz measurement has been a good representative of relative performance. On the other hand, a company's IT managers might have a slightly different evaluation process. Paul notes that “they run benchmarks, they run the real applications against it and in those environments, megahertz is not the only, nor the best surrogate for performance. How you deal with processing in a megahertz [is only part of] the equation.”

This goes to the heart of how Itanium is changing the way computing will be viewed in the coming years. For example, Paul noted that one of the largest institutions on Wall Street was about to convert their entire trading back end to one that is totally Itanium-based.

“What they will see is an increase in performance by a factor of ten, which to a firm such as this one equals a tremendous benefit in terms of cost efficiency and cost savings. The emphasis again is not on how powerful the machine is that sits on their desk, or the operating system that is the primary user interface. Instead, what really counts is the speed and flexibility of the overall application.”

In a way, this allows Itanium architecture to again be the right product implemented at the right time. As Joel Birnbaum had said, we had always felt there was “...an insatiable need for more performance—bigger, better, faster...Now we didn't know that the Internet would have such a major impact, we didn't know that every time you logged into your system there would be all these windows and communication with 40 different servers to even say hello.” Yet it is this increased performance requirement, particularly over a heavily trafficked network, which creates the need for Itanium-based systems.