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July 22, 2009, 6:53 am
I.B.M. Expects On-Time Arrival for Power7 Chip
By Ashlee Vance
Good news has been tough to come by in the world of super-fancy server chips, with companies like Intel and Sun Microsystems delaying and killing off products.
So I.B.M. looked like a model of stability by confirming Tuesday that its Power7 chip should appear as planned in the first half of next year.
The Power7 chip will slot into I.B.M.’s line of Unix servers that run today on Power6 chips. Unix systems tend to cost more than servers running on Intel and Advanced Micro Devices chips, and as such they drive higher profits for companies like I.B.M., Sun and Hewlett-Packard. Traditionally, banks, telecommunications companies and other large businesses have bought Unix computers to handle their toughest data-crunching jobs.
The Unix server market is in serious flux at the moment.
Oracle, for example, has agreed to acquire Sun, which claims about one-third of the Unix server sales. Sun’s revenue has plummeted during the recession as customers froze their purchases of large servers. More recently, The Times reported that Sun has killed off an upcoming family of chips code-named Rock that were meant to revitalize the company’s position in the market.
Sun has declined to comment on Rock’s fate.
Chips of this kind tend to cost well over $1 billion to develop. And Sun had already canceled Rock’s predecessor. So the company essentially ended a decade of chip investments without a viable product.
Unlike I.B.M and Sun, H.P. does not build its own Unix server chips. Instead, the company buys Intel’s Itanium chips.
H.P. saves money by avoiding the chip design and production costs, but it’s a slave to Intel’s schedule. And earlier this year, Intel revealed that it would delay its upcoming version of Itanium, code-named Tukwila, until 2010.
Poor Tukwila had once been scheduled to ship in about 2007 and has been delayed over and over as Intel struggles to build the product, which boasts more than 2 billion transistors.
H.P. is waiting less-than-patiently for Intel to polish off Tukwila.
The recent woes of Sun, H.P. and Intel could translate into good fortune for I.B.M.
Big Blue already sells the fastest Unix servers on the market and appears set to upgrade its systems just as competitors are catching up to its existing hardware.
I.B.M. promises to make it easy for customers to buy Power6-based servers today and then slot Power7 chips into those same servers as they arrive next year. In addition, I.B.M. has fleshed out some of its home-grown virtualization software, which lets customers run many applications on the same physical server.
This hardware and software combination is likely to put serious pressure on Oracle/Sun and H.P., as all of the companies look to coax customers into buying big-ticket computers once again.
I.B.M. Expects On-Time Arrival for Power7 Chip
By Ashlee Vance
Good news has been tough to come by in the world of super-fancy server chips, with companies like Intel and Sun Microsystems delaying and killing off products.
So I.B.M. looked like a model of stability by confirming Tuesday that its Power7 chip should appear as planned in the first half of next year.
The Power7 chip will slot into I.B.M.’s line of Unix servers that run today on Power6 chips. Unix systems tend to cost more than servers running on Intel and Advanced Micro Devices chips, and as such they drive higher profits for companies like I.B.M., Sun and Hewlett-Packard. Traditionally, banks, telecommunications companies and other large businesses have bought Unix computers to handle their toughest data-crunching jobs.
The Unix server market is in serious flux at the moment.
Oracle, for example, has agreed to acquire Sun, which claims about one-third of the Unix server sales. Sun’s revenue has plummeted during the recession as customers froze their purchases of large servers. More recently, The Times reported that Sun has killed off an upcoming family of chips code-named Rock that were meant to revitalize the company’s position in the market.
Sun has declined to comment on Rock’s fate.
Chips of this kind tend to cost well over $1 billion to develop. And Sun had already canceled Rock’s predecessor. So the company essentially ended a decade of chip investments without a viable product.
Unlike I.B.M and Sun, H.P. does not build its own Unix server chips. Instead, the company buys Intel’s Itanium chips.
H.P. saves money by avoiding the chip design and production costs, but it’s a slave to Intel’s schedule. And earlier this year, Intel revealed that it would delay its upcoming version of Itanium, code-named Tukwila, until 2010.
Poor Tukwila had once been scheduled to ship in about 2007 and has been delayed over and over as Intel struggles to build the product, which boasts more than 2 billion transistors.
H.P. is waiting less-than-patiently for Intel to polish off Tukwila.
The recent woes of Sun, H.P. and Intel could translate into good fortune for I.B.M.
Big Blue already sells the fastest Unix servers on the market and appears set to upgrade its systems just as competitors are catching up to its existing hardware.
I.B.M. promises to make it easy for customers to buy Power6-based servers today and then slot Power7 chips into those same servers as they arrive next year. In addition, I.B.M. has fleshed out some of its home-grown virtualization software, which lets customers run many applications on the same physical server.
This hardware and software combination is likely to put serious pressure on Oracle/Sun and H.P., as all of the companies look to coax customers into buying big-ticket computers once again.
