Silicon Valley Nation: Intel's Itanium-Xeon conundrum

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel has some tough decisions ahead of it at the high end of the server world. It's got two processors, Xeon and Itanium, selling into slightly different areas of the mainframe/supercomputer world.

These aren't your classic high-volume runners, so the company has over time rejiggered its engineering teams under server development VP and GM Rory McInerney to work on both. It's a way to maximize engineering resources and share technology insights between the architectures.

"Power, I/O technology have come from Xeon into Itanium. RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) has come from Itanium into Xeon," McInerney (pictured) said in an interview.

The modular approach has reached the point where the only difference between Xeon and Itanium is in the cores. The packaging, I/O, EDA tools, the chip set are common to both. In the cores, the difference rests with the fact that Itanium runs the HP/UX instruction set architecture while Xeon runs Windows and Linux.

In the scheme of things, this market lacks the volumes of markets that Intel's Atom processor enjoys. For Itanium, there's not a huge customer base; Hewlett-Packard, which rolled out new servers this week based on Itanium, remains the big kid on the block.

Which begs the question: How much longer can Intel continue to support two core designs running two ISAs at the high end?