What's Next in CPU Land after Itanium?

"I work for a major research organization. Of late a lot of the normal big computer companies have been visiting and preaching the gospel of Itanium. My question to them, and to the assembled masses here at Slashdot is what happens next when Itanium is real? My world view is that Itanium based systems will become commodity products very quickly after good silicon is available in reasonable volume. At that point, why should one spend $8-10k for that hardware from the likes of HP, Compaq, Dell and others when one can build it for $2k (or even less)? In other words, has Intel finally done in most of their customers by obliterating all the other CPU choices (except IBM Power4 [& friends G4, et al] and AMD Hammer) and turned the remainder of the marketplace into raw commodity goods? Lest you defend the other CPUs... Sparc is dead, Sun doesn't have the money (more than US$1B we'll guess) to do another round. PA-RISC is done, as HP has given away the architecture group. MIPS lacks funding (and perhaps even the idea people at this point). Alpha is gone too (also because of the heavy investment problem no doubt). Most other CPUs don't have an installed base that makes any difference, especially in the high end computing world. So what's next? I don't like the single track future that Intel has just because it is a single track!"

Comments

Itanium vs. Hammer vs. All Others.

[Talonius]

AMD's newest chip is supposedly fairly remarkable (don't have specifics, see Tom's Hardware's search engine). What about the Crusoe? VIA's purchase of (I believe) the M3? I wouldn't look at companies that are currently in the business only - I would tend to look at companies that might move into the business, either via investment, startup, or outright purchase.

I'm not too worried about Itaniums, and I don't see them becoming prevalent for quite a while. While the Pentium II, III, and IV moved through the marketplace fairly rapidly they all offered compatibility at some level. If I recall correctly 32 bit programs that are not rewritten for 64 bit run SLOWER on the Itanium than they do the equivalent Pentium line.

In essence consider this: it's like a brand new operating system attempting to break into the monopoly that Microsoft has. (Parallels drawn out of necessity.) While it may be better, faster, superior in every way it doesn't have 20+ years of legacy code behind it - and that will end up being what drags it down.

Only time will tell. Remember the Pentium Pros..

Talonius

Recurring problem

[colmore]

This seems to be a recurring problem in a number of technology based industries. Once you get to a certain lever of high-tech, only the (very) big boys can even compete.

So here's the question: how do you keep competition alive when an initial investment costs in the billions of dollars. For any company less than Intel sized, a single bad product cycle spells complete doom. That's no kind of market to be in.

Also, wasn't this inevitable. There are a few Beowulf jokes being posted, but that's really what's going on. Increasingly high performance tasks (Google, render farms etc. etc. etc.) are using massive arrays of low-power CPUs. It costs a lot of money to develop big iron chips, and if people aren't buying them then there's no point in investing that much money.

What I'm worried about are the isolated markets that still require massively powerful, low processor number architectures. Not everything splits into nice Distributed.net packages.

Re:Recurring problem

[Waffle Iron]

Speaking of badass mainframe processors, I was an intern at IBM in the mid 80's. The top-of-the-line mainframes used a central processor comprised of about 100 custom ECL chips mounted on a 4-inch-square 100-layer ceramic substrate.

The whole thing was cased in a shiny metal module. Each chip had its own sping-loaded heat slug that transferred heat to the cooling liquid sent through the module's plumbing. (100 ECL chips == major kilowattage)

They told me each CPU cost about $50,000. On a factory tour, I saw an entire pallette of these sitting on the floor, kind of like gold at Fort Knox.

These things may not perform like today's chips, but they gave meaning to the term "Big Iron"

SPARC is dead?

[bconway]

That's news to me. I could swear a friend of mine just jumped in on the UltraSPARC 4 project.

Itanium will be Hammered

[Brian Stretch]

The huge die size of the Itanium and its upcoming successor make the chip far more expensive than the Pentium series, so I would not expect Itanium machines for $2K. So far, the CPUs alone are several $thousand. I also haven't seen where its performence is that impressive. x86 code performence, since its emulated, is poor. Recompile or else. Intel has sold, what 500 Itanium CPUs?

The upcoming AMD Hammer series, OTOH, is supposed to be about 30% faster clock-to-clock than the current Athlon XP series (which is considerably faster clock-to-clock than the Intel P4) and start at 2GHz. Sun's recent announcement of Linux x86 platform support, with details to come midyear, suggests that they'll be moving to the Hammer (to ship Q4). Sun would certainly love to take a swipe at Intel, and Sun has made positive comments about AMD's x86-64 Hammer architecture.

Speculation: Intel gets Hammered in the second half of this year.

*cough* PoerPC *cough*

[S-prime]

Now that the G4 has finally gotten past the 1GHz mark, and Apple has a brand spanking new Unix based OS running on it(and if you don't like it you can run others), this opens a whole new choice for the researcher looking for a new platform.

Re:*cough* PowerPC *cough*

[joe_n_bloe]

Also featuring stinking fast floating point.

Dead? I doubt it.

[BlackStar]

SPARC dead? I'm not sure where you come across that idea. Having listened to a few talks down at JavaOne and chatted briefly with Marc Tremblay (head chip dude down there, father of MAJC and one designer of SPARC) they've already got design down on the next two levels of SPARC as the IV is experimental, and the V is the next production level as I understand it. MAJC seems to be the experimental platform they are using for smaller implementations and alternative ideas to be tried, based on some of Tremblay's theories.

I may be off base on some of the details, but Sun has a unified approach from top to bottom, from tools to silicon for the systems they plan to deliver. I doubt it will just throw in the towel. Ultimately, Sun ships iron, and they lead the market in their segment.

I don't see the basis for your assertion, and where you pulled 1B out of for cost I also don't know.

Alpha is AMD now, as that's where a good chunk of the people went. MIPS is still kicking, with the 14000 so far, but I won't speak to the future of that chip line. There's a lot of chip heads on this site with much better info than I on many of the lines.

One decent, although dated summary is here

Please tell me there's more information you're basing this on than consumer workstation marketshare....

NVidia, the next player

[Animats]

My own guess for the desktop is that NVidia will put a CPU core, probably from AMD, in the next generation of their nForce part. That puts CPU, graphics, networking, sound, disk control, and the motherboard logic on a single chip. Their current nForce part already has all of that but the CPU.

If you look at the transistor counts, NVidia's graphic chips already are more complicated than most CPU parts. This is quite do-able.

Re:NVidia, the next player

[maraist]

if you look at the transistor counts, NVidia's graphic chips already are more complicated than most CPU parts. This is quite do-able.

There's more to [CG]PU complexity than transistor count. Look at the 512Mbit memory cells that run for only a couple dollars a chip.

The trick is inter-related logic complexity. To my understanding the existing GPUs have no issues with backward compatability (so much of the x86 overhead is avoided), the core itself is pipelined and modular, so the complexity is spread out across the whole chip (independent teams can work on their own components with little concern for sistern components, whereas every ounce of performance is being squeezed out of x86's which require complete coordination). Further, graphics acceleration is simply the application of graphical algorithms into silicon. While I'm not quite sure which algorithms there are, the possibilities are endless. Imagine a fast-fourier transform implemented as a SIMD floating point instruction. You create an array of floating point logic units, and interconnect them. The floating point unit is pretty much a common-off-the-shelf design, so the only real logic you apply is the interconnectivity.

I'm not saying that GPU's are easy to design, I'm just saying that hardware filters are designed this way all the time, and I would'nt be surprised if a large percentage of the nVida chips weren't stock logic modules.

-Michael

You are nuts if you think ...

[joe_n_bloe]

... that a runtime environment where "Hello World" will require, let's say, several GB of disk, a few hundred MB of RAM, continuous online updating (also requiring continuous hardware updating), and hundreds of old and newly-arriving security holes and exploits, is going to "take over the world."

Granted, it's going to be popular for a while. But isn't what's popular *always* sucky?

My 2c

[UTPinky]

I had a professor last semester that worked at Intel, and several things he told me, reminded me of somthing: It's still a busisness. In my opinion Intel will not make any huge move, until they KNOW that they will profit off of it. This means that they won't make any major move until the consumer market is there. For example, he was telling us that there have been times where they have come up with ideas that would in fact increase performance, HOWEVER due to their wonderful job at brainwashing the entire public into thinking that clockspeed is THE measure of performance, they scrapped the ideas because they noticed that they would cost too much to implement, and would result in no frequency increase. (Thanks Intel)

I also think that while AMD has shown that they can provide an honest competition in terms of performance, it is going to be stuck following Intel's every move, for the mere reason that Intel is "sleeping with" so many big OEMS (*cough* Dell *cough*), leaving it as the CPU for the hobbyist

Well, anyways, that's just my 2c...

64-bit isn't necessary - and Itanium may suck

[camusatan]

The implicit assumption that the author is making here is that 64-bit CPU's such as Itanium will be the 'next big thing'. I'm not sure - 64-bit CPU's really only are necessary for machines that need more than 4 GB of VM space - and with various x86 addressing extensions, some IA32 CPU's can address up to 16 GB (I think).

Now don't get me wrong - 64-bit filesystems are great, and necessary - being limited to 2GB or 4GB files is terrible. But no 64-bit CPU is necessary for that kind of thing, the filesystem just has to be written as 64-bit (which is easier said than done, and could easily sacrifice backwards-compatibility with various API's, but I digress...).

That being said - Intel might very well be moving down the wrong path - the Itanium is a huge, expensive, hot, completely new chip. Even Intel is hedging its bets on whether or not Itanium will take off - and AMD is poised to eat Intel's lunch with their new Hammer design.

Who knows, perhaps all CPU's from now on will be compatible with x86 IA32, and innovation will be in the various processing units that sit behind the instruction-set decoder. Take a look at AMD or Transmeta for examples of that, already.

Re:I don't think we need to worry just yet

[SoftwareJanitor]

The only problem with AMD's 64 bit line is that it isn't going to be compatible with the Itanium. That is both good and bad. Good in that it is an alternative, bad in that it is going to cause a lot of confusion.

I think a lot of people are too overconfident that Itanium is going to be successful, let alone quickly. It is going to require a lot of changes to software in order to take advantage of it because it isn't just a 64 bit x86, it is a whole new architecture, one more closely related to HP PA-RISC than x86. It also may not do a very good job of running existing 32 bit code, which could slow down its acceptance, particularly in desktop systems. The last time Intel made a big push (with the i432) to create a whole new non-x86 processor family, it was less than successful. Although to be fair, the i432 was a radically different proposition and the Itanium with its more proven PA-RISC roots looks a lot more sound.

AMD's Hammer architecture, on the other hand, is more conservative, being a x86 family processor extended to 64 bit. It should require less modifications to existing software to take advantage of it, although an argument could be made that it won't have as much advantage to take having more legacy issues with the aging x86 architecture. It also may perform a lot better on existing 32 bit code than Itanium. And if AMD's track history holds true, it will probably be significantly less expensive than the Itanium.

A lot of whether it is Intel or AMD that paves the way for 64 bit mainstream CPUs will probably have to do with which of them is the first one that offers a price attractive product that runs existing 32 bit software well while being marketable as a 64 bit chip. Unfortunately for AMD, the marketable part is, as always going to be tough. While AMD has been hugely successful in "white box" sales where customers can choose their CPU, they've had a much more difficult time penetrating the big name PC markets, particularly in higher end systems. This despite the fact that in many cases an Athlon or Duron would offer a better performance than a PIII or P4 at a better price.

Sounds like a trollish or clueless post.

[guacamole]

My world view is that Itanium based systems will become commodity products very quickly after good silicon is available in reasonable volume. At that point, why should one spend $8-10k for that hardware from the likes of HP, Compaq, Dell and others when one can build it for $2k (or even less)?

When peolpe start buying Itanium systems in volume, then the prices will drop on the Itanium systems. The reasons, they're expensive is not because the chips are hard to come by but because no one wants to buy them right now.

However, this comment alone makes me wonder about he posters cluelessness. He obviously hasn't worked in any real production environment. You people should realize that you simply can't build the kind of systems that Dell, HP, etc sell -today- out of commodity components. Take a look at a typical high-end SMP Dell server: propietary OEM motherboard, propietary case, hot-swap hard drives, hot-swap redundant power supplies and cooling, LOM support, etc. All components have been carefully designed to work together to produce a reliable, and scalable server system. You will never ever build the same kind of system on your own and if you do it's not going to be cheaper than buying one. Plus you don't get the vendor support.

The comment about SPARC being death is completely astonishing at the time when Sun is -THE- unix market leader. SPARC CPUs were never faster than the competition but that didn't worry Sun users as long as they were up to par with the competitors. The reason people buy Sun hardware is not the CPUs (CPU is alone is useless) but Solaris which is THE enterprise class OS and its applications, Sun's excellent support, massive multiprocessor scalability of Sun systems, massive I/O bandwidth, etc.

Current Sun chip is not bad at all (UltraSPARC III) and Sun is working on UltraSPARC V.