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Inside the Itanium

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hammer-time dept.

vanguard writes: "Extreme Tech has a detailed overview of the Itanium. It's fairly long but it's worth your time if such things interest you."

5 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Why all the hubbub? by PoiBoy · · Score: 2, Insightful
    ...we'll evaluate the pros and cons of the "other" 64-bit processors used in workstations and servers, such as SPARC, Power, MIPS, and Alpha.

    What is so special about the Itanium other than the fact that it's from Intel? We've had 64-bit processors for years now. Moreover, it's not like everyone is going to ditch the IA32 architecture overnight and go to Itanium. It seems to me that anyone who needs/wants 64-bit computing already has it.

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  2. Not about 64 bits... by jeroenb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've been looking into the IA-64 for the past year orso, and I'm convinced that on the technology side, both the architecture and the implementation are a good thing. What surprises me is that it's still taking quite some time for it to start popping up in actual production environments. Not sure what the reasons for this are.

    First of all, with HP being a co-developer of the entire architecture, they are a big backer of the Itanium. So is Compaq, who sold their entire Alpha technology to Intel to focus on implementing the Itanium in all their high-end products (makes you think, was this all decided because they already knew they were going to merge with HP? Probably...) Dell is still sticking with 100% Intel, so the Itanium will be their bet for capturing more of the high-end segment. Even SGI is selling Itanium workstations (although, with the recent announcement of the MIPS-only, IRIX-only Fuel workstation, they might abandon the Itanium as well.)

    So what's holding it back? I think that although there's now Linux available for it as well as a prerelease version of Windows Server along with some other systems (like HP UX) we still need to see more applications. Databases alone just aren't enough - and with the high prices of Itanium machines (the cheapest dual-Itanium 733 is around $22K at Dell, everyone else is probably more expensive) developers are not really happy about buying a couple of those machines and start hacking. So I think that because we don't see the Itanium much, developers are not investing in writing the software and business are not investing in buying the hardware.

    Maybe Intel should start giving out IA-64 machines to opensource hackers and watch it fly? Where can I submit my address info? :)

    Oh and about the subject of this post, the fact that the Itanium is 64 bits is not really all that important - the fact that a processor is 64 instead of 32 bits doesn't say anything about how fast it is. If you think it does, you can buy my R4400 Indigo2 for $10K :)

  3. What's the point? by 4im · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Except for the Itanium coming from Intel, what's the point? This is a prototype for a new architecture (IA64), prototype proven to be seriously lacking in speed, stability etc. I got to see a dual Itanium prototype from HP a few months ago, and all the comments I got about it were that it essentially sucked.

    Really, if you need 64 bit, why not just go and get yourself some UltraSparc, Alpha etc.? I have gotten myself a used Ultra 30, will soon get an used AlphaServer, and I sure don't need to go buy an expensive, unstable processor that's not even got decent compiler support yet.

    And if it has to be IA64, at the very least wait for McKinley - HP's engineers are supposed to be doing a much better job of IA64 than Intel did. Or even wait for the version after McKinley, which is supposed to profit from good ol' Alpha.

  4. wrong direction? by markj02 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Itanium is built around the notion that many of the hard decisions about how to execute code efficiently should be handled in software (mostly, by compiler back-ends). I think this is not the right direction to go into. It means that every single compiler back-end will have to re-invent the wheel. Most likely, there will only be a small number of compilers that will do a decent job, and a lot of languages won't even try. That's fine if you think the world consists only of a bunch of SPEC benchmarks implemented in C/C++, Fortran, and Java, but it will make life even harder for non-standard languages or non-standard applications. And Itanium's implementation of VLIW seems particularly complex.

    Software is by far more costly and complex than processors these days, and we just don't need extra complications in the form of processors that shift even more complexity into software.

    I can't pretend to know what a "good" 64bit architecture should look like. But for the time being, something like Alpha or AMD Hammer seems like a better choice to me. And even Intel seems to be reconsidering and keeping a 64bit version of the Pentium as a backup strategy.

  5. Intel's compiler writers..... by zerofoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Lucky for intel, they do have a very talented bunch of compiler writers. Their work on P4 optimizations basically saved the P4 from itself. The problem is getting the rest of the complier world to support Intel's new architecture. Like them or not; Visual C and GCC are hugely popular, and until those guys support Itanic, Intel won't sell many of these newfangled processors.

    -ted