It's been a long time coming, but earlier this week, Intel finally launched "Tukwila," the latest iteration in its Itanium family of high-end microprocessors.

Coming on the same day as IBM introduced both its Power7 chip and the first of an associated line of servers, Tukwila didn't garner as much attention as it might have otherwise. It's also true that today's Itanium is something of a specialty product. But that doesn't make it irrelevant.

Tukwila will be the first Itanium to incorporate Intel's serial processor communications link (QuickPath Interconnect, or QPI) and integrated memory controllers. These features boost performance considerably and are standard fare for the current generation of server microprocessors. They also mean that the Itanium 9300, as Tukwila is officially known, and the Intel's upcoming Nehalem-EX Xeon (x86) processor can, in principle, be supported by the same system design.

It took many painful years--the better part of the last decade--for HP and its software partners to re-establish HP-UX's software catalog on Itanium when it migrated off PA-RISC. To start this process anew for Xeon is simply unthinkable.

And even if the features of Xeon have largely achieved parity with Itanium, the same isn't generally true of the platforms as a whole. HP-UX is a mature commercial Unix operating system in the mold of AIX and Solaris. Linux and Windows gain in capability and robustness with each passing year, but they're not yet at the same point. The contrast with NonStop is even more striking. This is, after all, a line of systems that powers about 75 of the 100 largest fund transfer networks around the world.

Plans can change, of course, and processors can slip. However, barring seismic changes, Intel sketched out a road map for something like a decade's worth of Itanium processors. I don't really expect these Itaniums to set a lot of performance records, but there's no reason to think that they won't be "in the ballpark." It's worth remembering that Sun sold lots of Sparc systems long after they had a "hot" microprocessor. The inertia in applications, skills, and general risk aversion in high-end servers is enormous.

Read the entire article from CNET here.