July 17 Business Week published an article that: Not long ago, Intel, Sun Microsystems and other chip makers have also launched a new chip product, which means the processor market this summer will usher in yet another feast.
Hot summer is always tough, and this summer for chip manufacturers will not be better, competition brings down prices, the market downturn in demand, coupled with computer manufacturers inventory backlog, the chip maker evidenced by their hardships.
But even in this difficult situation, all the major manufacturers are still introduced the "heavyweight" of new products. The most impressive is Intel's new Itanium chips, it is learned that the flagship high-end server market products for website construction and enterprise networks. The chip, code-named Montecito, which is commonly known as Itanium. And Intel's main product line is similar to using a dual-core Itanium also design. Another aspect of the product improvements in power consumption is also of concern, in fact, Intel hopes the chip power consumption by the upgrading of technology, back before the rival AMD has been winning market share. It is reported that Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, Hitachi and NEC and other companies produced high-end computer systems company, will use the new Itanium chips.
At present the major analyst evaluations on Intel Itanium chip, is disgraced, for example, president of Insight64 Southwest. Brooklyn, said: "Itanium chip, the performance of Itanium products before the older models twice, while power consumption is less than 2 per 1, no doubt, this is definitely a product worth looking forward to! "
Worrying history record
However, from the Itanium chip family history, the future of Itanium is worrying. According to statistics, because the manufacturing cost is too high, Itanium chip, the price is difficult to accept by the user, which resulted from product sales since the release failed to meet the set targets. In fact, in the development process of Itanium series, Intel's investment in research and development costs up to several billions of dollars, it also caused the excessive burden Chong's Itanium Bumenhennan achieve profit of Mubiao. And the outside world even rumors troubled Itanium sector will be Microsoft's resale to other companies, just like last month, Microsoft will be sold to Marvell wireless chip sector as.
安腾不会是绝唱
不过布鲁克林先生则坚持Itanium系列必将延续下去，因此安腾不会是该系列产品的绝唱。“购买了Itanium系列产品的用户肯定会考虑更新换代，这也为未来英特尔的销售工作奠定了基础，另一方面考虑到公司天文数字一般的投入，突然的转手他人也不在情理之中。”
Itanium有望自立门户
而一些分析家甚至认为，Itanium芯片将在不久的将来独立于英特尔芯片存在。众所周知，Itanium芯片使用了完全不同的IA 64架构，与AMD所依然坚持的x86架构完全不同。而英特尔本身针对桌面和笔记本市场的PC Core和Core Duo芯片以及Xeon服务器芯片，仍然使用着x86架构。MDR分析家表示：“在未来的一到两年内，Itanium也许将自立门户，不在隶属于英特尔芯片品牌之下。”
Sun的崛起
就在英特尔安腾产品吸引了几乎全部媒体目光的同时，Sun微系统的也在悄悄酝酿下一代服务器芯片，SPARC处理器家族，目前该计划代号为Niagara 2，也得名于世界著名的尼亚加拉大瀑布。据悉该产品将会在明年早些时候上市，公司在不久之前发布了基于Solaris操作系统的芯片原型，该产品使用了八内核设计，因此在多线程任务方面的表现极为枪眼。
磁内存技术的崛起
在服务器芯片领域之外，Freescale公司的磁内存（MRAM）也绝对值得关注，该产品结合了目前市场最为流行的两种内存产品的优点，即兼顾NAND闪存的断电存储特性以及DRAM内存的快速传输特性。据悉未来将出现在数字产品市场，例如数码相机和手机等。当然，目前磁内存在技术方面还存在许多缺憾，例如容量过小，目前Freescale研制出的产品容量只有可怜的4m，而未来公司表示未来两到三年内，将能把这个数字提高到16到64M。分析家表示，随着产品售价的降低，以及容量的提升，未来的磁内存产品有望代替NAND闪存目前的地位。