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Itanium Update
NegaMaxAlphaBeta writes: "For those of you interested in Intel's Itanium 64 bit processor, EETimes has a nice update article to let us know what's happening with this beast. With an 8 stage pipeline, as opposed to the 20 stage pipeline in the P4, clock frequencies are obviously not as high (~1 GHz). Other notable numbers extracted from the article: 130 Watts power consumption, 328 registers, 6 MB of onchip L3 cache ... quite nice (well, not the power thing). I'm sure many people can appreciate 64 bit integer ops; for me, it means single instruction xor for the 64 bit hash codes used in chess transposition tables."
So when most people go out and buy a computer, they see a lot of mhz and think it's really fast. So if they're use to 2ghz+ pentiums, why would they even think of buying a 1ghz itanium? Sure, I know it'll probably be faster, but how does intel plan to market these? Will they also drop mhz ratings like AMD? Or will they go on some major re-educaiton campaign, like Apple?
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
328 *physical* registers, not logical (ISA accessible). with 128 context switches will hurt big time ia64. yet another bad design decision of the itanic.
A context switch happens one in a blue moon. Fast context switches are not going to make up for sluggish performance for the real work the machine is doing between context switchs. Registers are considerably faster than cache; the absolutely fastest cache in the world is P4's L1 cache which has a load latency of 2 cycles, and on most architectures it is 3 cycles. Putting 128 qwords into registers is an absolutely dramatic speedup for programs which have a working set more than 8 dwords (all that IA-32 gives you).
This makes me wonder, how many Crusoe processors could you put in a box (all other components equal) and equal this power consumption? Would the performance of such a box meet or exceed the performance of an Itanium box for real-world servers?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Someone needs to defend the SPARC chipset, and what [I see] Sun Microsystems is doing, so here I am.
Sure the single processor, or even up to 8 processor results are not the greatest thing out there. In the single through four processor units Intel beats them, and higher the Power series takes over. What one tends to forget is, for a processor that is designed for SMP, A) 1024 processors linearly is damn good, and B) it is relatively cheap for a server class processor. Also the SPARC line is known to have the least number of hardware bugs of any major processor out there.
Sun really doesn't need a sports car of a chip anyway. Servers and workstations need uptime. They don't need to attack the user market yet. First they seem to be more actively attacking the workstation market with the sub-$1000 SunBlades. With a Sun solution the workstation only needs to be moderately fast, but the server needs to be DAMN fast because the most intensive processes run on the server and display over the network. Small steps.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person