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What's Next in CPU Land after Itanium?

Posted by Cliff on from the is-intel-the-only-chip-maker-left dept.

"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!"

2 of 541 comments (clear)

  1. So what CPU is IBM using? by joe_n_bloe · · Score: 1, Redundant

    I could have sworn you missed one.

  2. Parallel machines. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 2, Redundant

    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.

    The problem is that a massively parallel computer is only useful for certain classes of problem. There are many types of problem where communications load goes up very rapidly with the number of processors, which makes a cluster (with its relatively poor communications bandwidth) impractical. This is what Big Iron is designed to be useful for.