The Beatles could have been singing an anthem for the computer industry when they asked, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?”
Little did they know that 64 would eventually mark a milestone in the maturity of microprocessor technology: It’s the quantity of bits available for programming a new generation of chips that have recently gone into mass production. It amounts to a quantum jump ahead of the 32-bit variety that has been constraining system capacity for more than a decade.
Suppliers such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. could be feasting for years to come if they get the packaging right for buyers. As is often the case, financial institutions have been among the quickest adopters. “The financial sector has an amazing propensity to try new technologies,” notes Vish Mulchand, who is leading the 64-bit marketing push at Hewlett-Packard. “This is an industry that will pay up -- but we have to deliver.”
HP has begun to do just that. In the past few months, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CitigroupState Street Corp. employee benefits joint venture CitiStreet and retirement plan administrator First Trust Corp., among others, have stepped up to become marquee users of HP Integrity servers with Intel Corp.'s 64-bit Itanium 2 processors.
Users typically achieve substantial cost and performance improvements in data center management and transaction processing. Denver-based First Trust, a Fiserv subsidiary, reports a threefold performance improvement over its previous IBM RISC (reduced instruction-set computing) configuration; CitiStreet CIO Barry Strasnick says he anticipates a twofold gain by converting to Itanium-based servers from mainframes.
Also enjoying brisk demand for 64-bit platforms is Palo Alto, Californiabased Kx Systems, which develops high-speed databases to support some of the most sophisticated trading strategies used by hedge funds and Wall Street firms. Most of Kx’s deployments are on Opteron processors, from Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices.
Why the fuss over 64? The number refers to the length of a “word” in digital memory, and therefore the number of binary digits, or bits, processed in a single pulse of a computer’s clock. The clock speed is measured in millions or billions of cycles per second (megahertz or gigahertz). The difference between 32 and 64 bits compounds as processors are arrayed together and as clock speeds accelerate.
Kx Systems co-founder and chief technology officer Arthur Whitney estimates that a 64-bit architecture can increase a firm’s ability to process and analyze incoming data streams, such as tick-by-tick stock quotes, by a factor of 100. To cope with the explosion of market data in recent years, “64-bit is almost necessary,” explains Whitney. “We really blew through 32-bit a few years ago.”
The industry, of course, managed to make do. Institutions have had access to 64-bit technology over the past few years, in Sun Microsystems Solaris servers, for example. But those are expensive products requiring special programming efforts. Companies working with less costly Wintel (Microsoft Windows/Intel) machines were able to split their processing across multiple 32-bit systems, but performance levels fell well short of what one 64-bit system could deliver.
Intel’s Itanium and AMD’s Opteron are designed for the fast-growing commodity-server market and especially appeal to companies that are moving to the open-source Linux operating system. According to a “total cost of ownership” analysis published by Intel, the company’s most powerful processor on Linux costs $819,000, compared with $13.4 million for an equivalent RISC unit.
There’s another benefit for cost- conscious technology managers: 64-bit systems let them run multiple operating environments -- such as Windows, Unix and Linux -- while leaving older applications in place. “This protects their past investment and gives them the flexibility to upgrade over the next five-year capital investment cycle,” says HP’s Mulchand.
They’ll need that cushion, suggests Bhaskar Dasgupta, business solutions director for Front Capital Systems, a London-based subsidiary of SunGard Data Systems. “Most of these enterprises are still 32-bit,” he observes. “It will take two to three years before 64-bit gets deployed widely enough to be fully optimized.”
Might the next doubling of capacity be in view by then? Says Mulchand, “I can only believe that 64 will soon be the norm, as 32 is now; 128 is way out, and I can’t begin to quantify it.”
