Competition

Competition

The Itanium 2 competes in the enterprise server and high-performance computing (HPC) markets. Itanium's major competitors include Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC IV+, Fujitsu's SPARC64, IBM's POWER6, AMD's Opteron, and Intel's own Xeon servers.

Throughout its history, Itanium has had the best floating point performance relative to fixed-point performance of any general-purpose microprocessor. This capability is useful in HPC systems but is not needed for most enterprise server workloads.

By 2005, Itanium systems accounted for about 14% of HPC systems revenue, but the percentage has declined as the industry shifts to x86-64 clusters for this application.

Supercomputers & HPC
Percentage of Top500 systems (x86 includes x86-64)

An Itanium-based computer first appeared on list of the TOP500 supercomputers in November 2001. The best position ever achieved by an Itanium 2 based system in the list was #2, achieved in June 2004, when Thunder (LLNL) entered the list with an Rmax of 19.94 Teraflops. In November 2004, Columbia entered the list at #2 with 51.8 Teraflops, and there was at least one Itanium-based computer in the top 10 from then until June 2007. The peak number of Itanium-based machines on the list occurred in the November 2004 list, at 84 systems (16.8%); by November 2008, this had dropped to nine systems (1.8%).

New Itanium implementations in high performance computing (HPC) are primarily for research areas (such as biochemical research) where typical workloads perform better on large, shared memory systems rather than distributed clusters. These systems typically have 16 to 64 processors, and are not comparable in size to the supercomputers on the TOP500 list.