Slashdot Mirror
Itanium Preview And 32-bit Benchmarks
XBL writes: "Tweakers.net has posted a preview of the Itanium that includes benchmarks of the x86 emulator. Looks pretty dismal here, as it struggles to keep up with even a Pentium I in many areas! Let's just hope that 64-bit apps will make this thing not look so bad. That $4k pricetag hurts though, no matter how fast it will be."
Now that I'm don'e trolling... Seriously, this article was an EXCELLENT overview of the new IA-64 architecture. Intel did a great job on trying to fix the many problems of ia-32 and I believe they did very well. I don't think there will be any contest between the AMD x86-64 and the Intel IA-64 processors. Intel will win hands down on ONE condition. If they manage to develop the compilers to handle all of the parallel compilation and predicition. COmpilers are difficult enough to design. This design increases the complexity by a magnitude at least. A telling quote is "The compilers have been under development almost as long as the hardware"
So the next few years should be very interesting. If INtel and their partners can get compilers available that do what they need to, the IA-64 architecture will probably scare even the most diehard AMD person. Even at $4K a processor - the potential processing power is scary and would be a steal.
But they may not. And it will be interesting if the AMD x86-64 stuff comes out ready to go and the IA-64 processor is still hampered by compiler issues. The tables could be completely turned where AMD wins in the short term based mostly on the speed gain of mega memory and bus bandwidth while hte IA-64 lags due to compiler issues. By the time the compiler is really taking advantage of the IA-64's cuttin gedge features, Intel could possibly have a lot of ground to catch up. A complete reversal.
Who knows. I love my Athlons and still feel they are today's top performers for the price. I hope AMD scores a homerun with their x86-64 architecture and I really like how they are opening up the development efforts so early. It was a shrewd move on their part. But the next 5 years will be astonishing and I have to say, if Intel pulls this off and succeeds in developing these compilers, the first time I run IA-64 compiled software on an IA-64 would give me goosebumps at the massive amount of computing power at my fingertips in a mid tower case ;)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
If you'd like to try out Itanium-based systems for yourself, we happen to have one running Linux in the Compaq Test Drive Program. Check it out and see for yourself just how it performs. Sign up on the Test Drive web site, and we'll give you a free shell account on not only our Linux Itanium system, but also on a wide variety of Alphas, x86's, and even StrongARM's running lots of different operating systems.
but, the itanium should excell mostly at running native 64-bit code, hopefully mostly in the floating point area. x86 emulation shouldnt have even been included, let alone talked seriously about.
One would indeed wonder how much smaller / cheaper / cooler / insert-good-thing-here the Itanium would be if they hadn't wasted the effort on hardware x86 emulation then? Surely any modern CPU should be able to do software x86 emulation with better performance than those Itanium benchmarks revealed.. which makes this look like (yet another) costly mis-step for Intel.
dont judge these things by their x86 emulation, benchmark them against a similarly clocked (or similarly priced) alpha
Well, one of the "selling points" for an Itanium over an Alpha is that it does emulate x86.. if the Alpha can do it in software better than the Itanium can do it in hardware (and it does) then where does that leave this as a selling point?
Why oh why are they testing IA32 code on the Itanium? That is hardly likely to show the performance of the processor in a good light. It's like running an Amiga emulator on x86 and complaining that the copper tricks don't work as quickly.
The Itanium is supposed to be the first in a new line, so I wouldn't be surprised if its IA32 bit convertor was a bolt-on solution for those who can't release themselves from 32bit (I hesistate to mention that 64 bit Windows apps may be a little short on the ground for a while yet ...).
The other aspect of benchmarking a system is to have equivalent compilers - different compilers can produce code varying in speed by as much as a factor of two on the same architecture and other factors such as optimizer flags can have a serious impact on the eventual speed.
The obvious set up to compare the Itanium against the competition (which really should include the Alpha, Ultra Sparc and the 64 bit POWER chips, not just x86 architectures) and pick an OS which runs on all of these. Not let me think ... Then use GCC in unoptimized mode and compare code length and execution speed, and then optimize progressively.
That the Itanium can't hold a candle to a Pentium I 100MHz on some 32 bit code is amusing, but not a real indicator of speed. That said, I still feel that the Itanium is a weak competitor against the assembled 64 bit processors already on the market, but Intel probably has sufficient clout to carve itself a niche.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I haven't heard anyone compare this to the transition to the Power Mac that Apple pulled off a few years ago. They did an amazing job with their 68K emulator, to the extent that the first 60 MHz PowerPC 601 chips could execute 68K code at about the same speed as a 40 MHz 68040. I think that's amazing performance! In fact, 90% of the software was still 68K code for the first couple of years.
It was extremely significant that the Power Mac emulated 68K code so well, because it meant that a bunch of old drivers and extensions written in assembly language didn't need to be rewritten. In fact, they ran so fast that many of them didn't get rewritten for years! Mac OS 8.0 still had lots of 68K code in it! (I think it's pretty much gone in Mac OS 9.0, but who knows?)
The fact is that there are a lot of programs that will never get recompiled for the Itanium. So if it can't execute all of those programs with any sort of speed, people will be discouraged from switching.
>> Early benchmarks with IA-64 code on Itanium systems have shown that the new architecture is certainly capable of blowing the P4 out of the water with half the clockspeed.
> Uh, shouldn't it be at least capable of blowing the P4 out of the water at a quarter of the clockspeed?
It should be neither, really. Some 32 bit instructions can be executed 2 at a time with a 64 bit register but some can't. You also have the overhead of condensing 2 32-bit instructions into one 64-bit and vice-versa. If execution were absolutely linear, IA-64 wouldn't even be twice as fast as IA-32. It's not, so results will vary.
We should compare running 64-bit math on an Itanium and 64-bit math on a P4. Running legacy code is as illogical as running 16-bit code on a Pentium so I also question Intel's hardware emulation decision.
Flavio