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Hoping to spread enthusiasm among users for Itanium 2, Intel put the second-generation 64-bit chip to the test. The result: a clear knock-out over its predecessor.

Intel disclosed results from a new series of tests Wednesday, which it said illustrate potential performance gains from its forthcoming Itanium 2 processor.

Intel conducted most of the tests internally, and independent corroboration won't be possible until systems go on sale in coming months. But Intel's preliminary numbers appear to support the company's long-held claim that Itanium 2 will better the performance of its first 64-bit chip by 50 to 100 percent, depending on the type of application.

Improvements No Surprise

Intel's results came as no surprise to one analyst. Intel has applied improvements to Itanium 2's architecture that it learned about--and wished it could have included--when it designed the first version of the chip, says Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research. "With a second implementation you almost always see a significant performance gain," he says.

Boosting Itanium's performance is essential for Intel as it tries to steal business from makers of RISC chips like Sun Microsystems, which dominate the midrange server market. The first Itanium chip suffered delays before it shipped in May of last year and came to be regarded by many analysts as a proof-of-concept vehicle. Intel hopes that Itanium 2, formerly known as McKinley, will have enough muscle to reach a much wider audience.

"With the first generation of Itanium, we did a good job of establishing the architecture," says Jason Waxman, Intel's marketing manager for enterprise platforms. "We got the platform out there and got a lot of people to do some initial deployment, some initial evaluation of it. With Itanium 2, the bar is a lot higher for us, and the goal is to go out there and establish world-class performance."

Itanium 2 is on track to ship around midyear, along with the first two- and four-way servers and workstations from major Intel customers, he says. Larger systems packing 8 or 16 processors will appear gradually in the months that follow, Waxman says. Besides Sun, Intel will compete against IBM and Advanced Micro Devices, which has said it will launch its first 64-bit chip later this year.

Helpful or Hopeful Results?

Benchmarks are about more than bragging rights. Ideally they help consumers gauge what type of performance they can expect from a system running a particular type of application. They often include a price/performance ratio, though Intel did not disclose pricing for Itanium 2 with its results, which were due to be presented Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum conference in Munich.

Sun was skeptical of the results, which in many cases claimed better performance than servers based on Sun's own UltraSparc chips. Sun complained that Intel's results were skewed by the Itanium 2's large, on-chip level-3 cache, which stores frequently used data close to the processor and may have yielded performance gains that wouldn't be realized in a real-world setting, according to Sue Kunz, director of marketing for Sun's processor products group. She says the results also overlook the fact that Itanium 2 chews up more power than Sun's chips do, making it harder, she argues, for system makers to build servers around the chip.

Sun has some basis for skepticism. At its developer conference in San Francisco earlier this year, Intel contrasted the performance of an Itanium server with what it characterized as a comparable system from Sun; it later emerged that the Sun system was based on an older UltraSparc II chip that was about to be retired.

"We have to take whatever they tell us at face value," McCarron says of Intel's results. The integrated cache on Itanium 2 might well have affected some of the results--but not all of them--he adds.

Better Design Performs Better

Intel's tests were intended to measure the chip's ability to run large databases, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, and high-performance technical and scientific applications such as those used to design aircraft or model weather patterns. Other tests measured online transaction processing and system memory bandwidth.

In each case, software was rewritten to take advantage of architectural enhancements in Itanium 2. Applications written for the first Itanium but not recompiled for the newer chip would still produce 80 percent to 90 percent of the performance gains, according to Waxman. The systems tested were prototypes built by Intel with 1-GHz Itanium 2 chips; 1 GHz is the clock speed at which the chip will be introduced. The current Itanium tops out at 800 MHz.

The performance gains come from various design improvements, Waxman said. Among them, Itanium 2 has a 400-MHz system bus that is 128 bits wide, compared to Itanium's 133-MHz, 64-bit-wide bus. Itanium 2 has a 3MB level-3 cache integrated alongside the processor. The first Itanium comes with a cache up to 4MB in size, but the cache is separate from the main processor, and that tends to slow data transfer speeds.

Intel expects to follow Itanium 2 next year with two new chips, code named Madison and Deerfield. These will be manufactured using a more advanced, 0.13-micron manufacturing process, Waxman says. Farther away on the horizon is a chip code-named Montecino, which is due in about 2004, he says.

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