Rory McInerney, director of engineering at Intel, recently visited the UK to spread the word about the chip giant’s x86-based 64bit Itanium 2 processor. Itanium 2 first launched in a dual-core configuration last year as a platform to compete with Risc-based Sun Sparc and IBM Power mainframes. It will be refreshed with a “Montvale” derivative offering faster clock speeds, bigger caches and a faster front-side bus at the end of this year, with a quad-core “Tukwila” version expected in 2008.

ITWeek: How secure is Itanium’s future?

McInerney: We had some well-documented troubles in the past [early Itanium chips were late, slow and suffered software incompatibilities] where people were saying, “What the hell is Intel doing?” It is about getting customer confidence and the engineering back on track. We have market inroads and a good product roadmap, so do not doubt Intel’s commitment to Itanium.

How are sales of Itanium 2 servers progressing?

We are set to claim over a third of total EU mainframe spending in 2007, and there is clear value in the technology for Intel and its partners. Software vendors now have an installed base of Itanium systems for them to make money off. IBM is now telling the world how bad Itanium is, but it was never even big enough for them to mention it before.

What cost advantage does Itanium offer over Sparc and Power servers?

Sun outsources its Sparc design to Texas Instruments [TI], but TI is no longer in the silicon business so Sun has to find a new partner, and transition means cost. Unlike IBM, Intel is paying for Itanium [production costs] from the high-volume chips going through its fabrication facilities. The volumes drive the cost of the silicon wafers down, so we can add the production costs onto other CPUs to reduce the cost of the Itanium chips. Can IBM continue to build $2bn fabrications for the same purpose?

How do the platforms compare on performance?

Itanium currently has five out of the top 10 benchmarked mainframes in the world, using three different operating systems, and the rest are IBM Power5 computers. This is likely to change, and we expect to leapfrog each other in a race towards the end state. We value performance per watt (PPW) and socket performance more than IBM. Power6 delivers 4.7GHz on a DB2 application, it probably works quite well but would you get the same result running Oracle? You have to decide to go for clock frequency or wattage and we’ve gone for wattage.

What is driving investment in new server architectures?

Our customers are concerned about the size of their databases growing beyond 1TB. Lots of business decisions are based on software licences. SQL Server is selling well, because Itanium supports very large memory configurations for the future.