We have covered Intel's roadmaps for the consumer/business desktop, mobile, and workstation markets over the past several weeks. There is still one piece of the puzzle left, the server roadmap.
This roadmap shows what we believe Intel's future plans to be for their server CPUs and chipsets. We compiled this roadmap after speaking with multiple sources close to Intel. We then compared our sources' information and filtered it through our own knowledge to bring you this roadmap.
And remember as you read, plans change. Changing market conditions require Intel to adapt. These are what we believe to be Intel's current plans. We will start with what we see are major trends in Intel's server roadmap, then we will move on to give specifics about each of Intel's market segments.
The major trend of Intel's server roadmap is the move to IA-64. IA-64 is Intel's 64-bit Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture, designed to massively increase the computing abilities of Intel's high-end servers. The move to IA-64 marks Intel's larger move into the high-end server space currently fought over by the likes of IBM, Sun, HP, Compaq and SGI. Intel expects its products to have superior performance for the money by keeping costs down through the large economies of scale Intel is capable of. They are also lining up tremendous industry support to make sure that, when they deliver the hardware, there will be third party software to run on it.