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.

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.

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.

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...