“We’ve been hearing about it for more than a year: Intel’s
mighty Merced, now called Itanium, the first processor to be based
on Intel’s long-awaited IA-64 architecture. But is this just
another step up the bigger-and-faster ladder, or is IA-64 truly the
quantum leap Intel and its partners have been promising these many
months? And even if the latter is true, exactly what difference
will that make to the lives of harried network and systems
administrators? In other words, aside from more CPU cycles, what
does Itanium mean for you?”
“Itanium will be different as Intel has taken great pains to
ensure that system components typically provided by other vendors
will be ready to take full advantage of the IA-64 architecture.
This includes hardware components, such as RAM and I/O bus
technologies, as well as software components like the operating
system and development compilers. Of all the major server
hardware vendors, only Sun Microsystems still remains outside the
IA-64 fold. At least four operating system vendors have
announced they will release products with IA-64 support in the near
future. Among the most prominent are IBM/SCO’s Monterey,
Microsoft’s Win64 and Novell’s Modesto. Others supporting IA-64 are
Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX and the open source Linux community. Intel
has even gone so far as to ensure application-level support for
Itanium, including vendors like Baan, IBM (DB2), Microsoft (SQL
Server), Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP.”
“Operating Systems: Initially will support five OS platforms,
including HP-UX, IBM/SCO Monterey, Linux, Microsoft Win64, and
Novell Modesto.”