Intel Itanium outsells AMD Opteron

**god_43** · 02-08-2010, 11:57 PM

Intel kicked off its Itanium presentation today by saying the Itanium's system revenue since the introduction of 2001 has crossed the $5 billion mark. That outsells total sales of AMD's Opterons.

And, according to IDC Itanium sales surpassed all of SPARC sales for the first time since the introduction of the Itanium. That was in 2001 and was the culmination of former CEO Andy Grove's dreams of a microprocessor that was truly mission critical.

Never before has Intel put two billion transistors onto a transistor. The presenter said that if I started clicking on his foils and there were two billion of them, it would take 62 years,

http://www.tgdaily.com/networking-br...ls-amd-opteron

i guess itanic is not a failure after all eh? what exactly is its allure though?

**[XC] Oj101** · 02-09-2010, 12:34 AM

Itanium isn't x86 so surely these two aren't competing products?

**haylui** · 02-09-2010, 12:49 AM

$5 billion
I thought Itanium total shipped SKU
lolz

**saaya** · 02-09-2010, 01:11 AM

i think they mixed something up, intel has SPENT $5bn on itanium, not MADE $5bn with it ^^
seriously tho, even if they made that much money with it, the dev costs were several times that of an x86 cpu to date, so yeah, it better does make more money than x86 cpus

**Helloworld_98** · 02-09-2010, 01:11 AM

this point would be somewhat valid about itanium outselling opteron but opteron was released 2 years after itanium.

**Darakian** · 02-09-2010, 01:56 AM

Never before has Intel put two billion transistors onto a transistor.

I see the secret! :P

Horrid writing, no source.... ya good news

**Nedjo** · 02-09-2010, 02:23 AM

and price of one Itanium procesor is?

**~~Katanai~~** · 02-09-2010, 03:27 AM

Originally Posted by saaya

i think they mixed something up, intel has SPENT $5bn on itanium, not MADE $5bn with it ^^
seriously tho, even if they made that much money with it, the dev costs were several times that of an x86 cpu to date, so yeah, it better does make more money than x86 cpus

Actually Intel was not alone in the development process, HP was also involved so afaik part of that investment was shared between the two. I work for HP Enterprise Business and I've stated before on this forum that Itanium is not by far unsuccessful like people make it out to be. We configure and sell Itanium systems on a daily basis and although I can not get into details it doesn't surprise me at all that on a whole it outsold the Opteron...

**duploxxx** · 02-09-2010, 03:36 AM

stupid headline, its outsell in total sales, what would you expect, it also cost 100X more

**Sn0wm@n** · 02-09-2010, 04:06 AM

one question.... who uses itanium cpu's ???? large corporation who run them on clusters for scientific purpose ???? if so they did what they were meant.... and btw before the opteron came to market a large numbers of top500 supercomputer were using itanium iirc

**zalbard** · 02-09-2010, 06:17 AM

Originally Posted by Oj101

Itanium isn't x86 so surely these two aren't competing products?

+1
Each Itanium CPU costs at least 10x more I bet... Not even talking about all the other hardware that's required to run it.

**v_rr** · 02-09-2010, 07:23 AM

Revenue != Profit

They can make 5B in revenue but -5B on profit.

**Manicdan** · 02-09-2010, 07:32 AM

why would intel want to sell a bunch of non x86 cpus?

**haylui** · 02-09-2010, 07:50 AM

Originally Posted by Manicdan

why would intel want to sell a bunch of non x86 cpus?

good question...lolz

**Telo** · 02-09-2010, 07:50 AM

If I remember correctly, Itaniums used to run about 3-5k when they first came out in 2001, so in today's market if it comes out like that again [which prolly will since Opterons and some Xeons can get up to almost 2k] it should be around 10x the price of i7 CPUs [with 920 being at an avg of $250 and the next one up at around $500].

On a side note how do you explain "Never before has Intel put two billion transistors onto a transistor."? I guess he meant processor instead.

**Gilgamesh** · 02-09-2010, 07:51 AM

Titanic price list:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/18445

Processor C/T Speed Turbo L3 cache QPI TDP Price
Itanium 9350 4/8 1.73 GHz 1.86 GHz 24 MB 4.8 GT/s 185 W $3,838
Itanium 9340 4/8 1.60 GHz 1.73 GHz 20 MB 4.8 GT/s 185 W $2,059
Itanium 9330 4/8 1.46 GHz 1.60 GHz 20 MB 4.8 GT/s 155 W $2,059
Itanium 9320 4/8 1.33 GHz 1.46 GHz 16 MB 4.8 GT/s 155 W $1,614
Itanium 9310 2/4 1.60 GHz N/A 10 MB 4.8 GT/s 130 W $946

**Telo** · 02-09-2010, 07:54 AM

Originally Posted by Manicdan

why would intel want to sell a bunch of non x86 cpus?

Because large corps got deeper pockets and their IT engineers are playing with someone else's money so they get the latest and gratest no matter the price.

**saaya** · 02-09-2010, 08:37 AM

Originally Posted by Katanai

Actually Intel was not alone in the development process, HP was also involved so afaik part of that investment was shared between the two. I work for HP Enterprise Business and I've stated before on this forum that Itanium is not by far unsuccessful like people make it out to be. We configure and sell Itanium systems on a daily basis and although I can not get into details it doesn't surprise me at all that on a whole it outsold the Opteron...

thx for the infos

well i think the main problem is that intel aimed way too high... they claimed it would be the next big thing, it would replace x86, every server would use itaniums yadda yadda... and while im sure there are quite some itnaium servers sold... i wouldnt really call it successful...

Originally Posted by Sn0wm@n

one question.... who uses itanium cpu's ???? large corporation who run them on clusters for scientific purpose ???? if so they did what they were meant.... and btw before the opteron came to market a large numbers of top500 supercomputer were using itanium iirc

i think military and gov... mission critical...

mission critical or military grade components basically means top quality no matter the cost... almost literally... whether the quality is beyond what actually makes sense is topic for long debates...

i for one think there are much more "price conscientious" ways to reach the same level of reliability or a high enough level of reliability... most people dont care because they dont realize that its their tax money that is used to buy systems that cost 10-100x or comparable retail products...

Originally Posted by Manicdan

why would intel want to sell a bunch of non x86 cpus?

many belive that intel originally planned to kill off amd that way or at least lock them out of the lucrative server market and doom them to a second grade cheap and low revenue market segments...

it makes perfect sense...
amd could not possibly compete with intel if they manage to establish some different instruction set. thats the main point of amds and intels success of the past decades, locking everybody out of x86, or keeping them locked out...

**M.Beier** · 02-09-2010, 08:52 AM

Itanium is known as the most stable processor if Im not mistaking.... They are NONE 32bit...
Price range on 1K volume starts just below the 1K USD mark.... and goes to 4K.....

Not so important stuff for end users

**Wiggy McShades** · 02-09-2010, 09:05 AM

Originally Posted by Manicdan

why would intel want to sell a bunch of non x86 cpus?

The x86 instruction set isn't exactly the best thing ever made. For mission critical systems that have giant budgets and possibly run custom software a new instruction set isn't too ridiculous because no one is looking for comparability at that level compared to consumers.

on an unrelated noted, I wonder if cuda could become a competitor to these types of systems at least in the high performance space probably not the enterprise level.

**zalbard** · 02-09-2010, 09:16 AM

Originally Posted by haylui

good question...lolz

I think they wanted to replace x86 with IA64 at some point... slowly moving from super high-end computers to enthusiast solutions and then ordinary desktop ones.
But it didn't quite work out.
Pity.

**~~Katanai~~** · 02-09-2010, 09:36 AM

Originally Posted by saaya

i wouldnt really call it successful...

I would. There are companies that buy only Itanium based systems from us. It's too much to explain in a post but believe me when I say that one of our Superdomes with 128 cores and a maximum of 1TB of RAM ain't no joke. But it's not really about that, you can make a much faster system using x86 CPU's for a fraction of the price. The main thing is the mission critical part. A Superdome simply put will not fail, no matter what. Some companies are ready to pay large amounts of money for that assurance. It's just that normal people never hear about these systems. No part of it, starting from the CPU and up to the OS, usually HP-UX, is meant for the consumer market. Just to give you an idea on how widespread this architecture is, here's a link with our Superdome customers:

http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/...customers.html

Remember that these are multimillion dollar systems. That list doesn't include customers for our RX series servers or Itanium based blades, which are much more accessible and much more widespread...

**SocketMan** · 02-09-2010, 10:41 AM

Ford outsells Lamborghini !

**Frank M** · 02-09-2010, 10:44 AM

Itanium's system revenue since the introduction of 2001 has crossed the $5 billion mark. That outsells total sales of AMD's Opterons.

Let's not forget that Opterons came later (mid-2003), and AMD then was
more of an underdog with much lower market share and volume...

**god_43** · 02-09-2010, 10:53 AM

amd and intel need to come together and make a successor to x86.....like x64 or something?

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