HP to power-up Itanium servers

Hewlett-Packard is to announce two server components that will vastly increase the power of the company's Itanium servers, bringing them to parity with the machines using processors of the company's own design.

HP will announce at the Intel Developer Forum the sx1000 chipset, which will let HP build machines with eight to 64 Itanium processors. It also will announce a packaging technology called mx2 that will let the company plug two Itaniums into a single socket, giving a powerful upgrade option and enabling mammoth machines with as many as 128 processors.

The sx1000, code-named Pinnacles, will begin shipping in servers in mid-2003, said Jean-Jacque Ozil, director of the Itanium program for HP's Business Critical Systems Group. The mx2 technology, code-named Hondo, is due in the first quarter of 2004, he said.

The products show that HP, while reliant on Intel for the Itanium processor itself, is able to control much of the rest of its high-end computing destiny.

While HP plans to phase out its own PA-RISC processor line two generations from now, the company's two main rivals - IBM and Sun Microsystems - have their own high-end processor lines and therefore have been insulated against the problems Itanium has had getting to market.

Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said: "Certainly HP has a great dependency on Intel for Itanium processor family delivery. They're probably pretty smart not to create yet more dependences."