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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!"
Think for a minute how long we've been using 32-bit processors. If (and when) 64-bit becomes mainstream, I imagine it will be around for a LONG time, as it becomes standardized and slowly takes over a majority of the market. Also, we'll have the other contenders butting in with equivalent and cheaper options, like Cyrix (tried) and AMD (did).
Just because Intel will pave the way for mainstream 64-bit processors using the Itanium doesn't mean it will monopolize the market until it comes out with a 128-bit processor. No matter what, it will probably be years from now before we have to worry.
The speed of time is one second per second.
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
My reality check bounced.
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.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
That's news to me. I could swear a friend of mine just jumped in on the UltraSPARC 4 project.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Having recently participated in an NDA from Sun regarding the SPARC processor (and even with the knowledge I had walking into the meeting), SPARC is not dead or dying. In fact, I'd say that Sun squarely recognizes it as a strength. Their competition (HP for example), however, is wishing they didn't knife their baby.
As far as money to go another round, remember, Sun doesn't fab CPUs. What Sun does is design them, and they turn it over to Texas Instruments for production. And TI has their own reasons to keep up-to-date with the latest production technologies, so Sun doesn't eat that cost.
BTW: I really wish that I could talk about the SPARC presentation. I liked it a whole lot better than the NDA I attended with HP talking about their Itanic future.
Given the tremendous capital requirements in building a state of the art fab along with the incredible amount of enginnering man-hours required to leap to the next level, I think we are seeing a situation similar to the one for airliners: Airbus or Boeing. They are the only two that matter because the cost of entry into the airliner market is so prohibitive. This does not necessarily apply to Microsoft and it's OS monopoly as the Linux community has illustrated. Mindshare and marketshare are not always linked.
I have hopes for Intel producing the worlds best microprocessors as that would benefit s all. Simply advocating a move to Itanium for marketing reasons or to meet revenue targets does a disservice to the computer industry.
Then again, they are in business to make $$$....
The Unobtainium
It's release will follow the distribution pattern established by Transmeta.
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.
No, Itanium will not become commodity as soon as you foresee because compilers and software do not exist to make good use of it (some argue nothing can make good use of it [derogatory]).
No, Intel has not killed the competition. AMD is alive and well. The PowerPC family is on the verge of The Next Big Thing (G5). And the reports of Sparc's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
No, other vendors are not irrelevant. Hitachi makes killer chips for big iron, and looks set to increase that trend. If anything, the CPU market is looking less and less like a monopoly than before.
Lies about crimes
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.
-- Your local friendly mad scientist-in-training
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....
A fast CPU is nice, but how about upgrading the rest of the standard PC architecture and peripherals to the same level?
:P
Weren't we all suppose to be using high-speed serial connections by now instead of a cocktail of SCSI (1/2/3, wide, fast, hold the mayo), IDE (ATA-33/66/100), parallel, 8 bit serial, USB, Firewire, PS/2, PCI, ISA (which is finally disappearing), etc. Heck, I'd be happy if the motherboard ran at even half to a third the speed of the cpu.
Using a 20 year old peripheral port on last weeks multi-gig cpu is like sucking a McDonalds shake through a coffee stirrer!
If you look at the transistor counts, NVidia's graphic chips already are more complicated than most CPU parts. This is quite do-able.
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...
I'm only paranoid because everyone is against me...
Rewriting standard applications to take advantage of the Itanium is one thing. However, companies that need a $10k+ server usually have programs that are specialized. After 20 years of the x86 standard there's a large codebase, although given a few improvements along the way. If you read the FreeDOS article a little while back companies were still running DOS in production systems, because it *works*. Porting it to Itanium will be a lot worse than porting it to x86-64 and Hammer. Let's face it, the hardware cost is usually minimal today. Software programmers however, are not cheap.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Not likely, it would take a couple of weeks max for the first compilers to appear
You obviously know nothing about Itanium, EPIC, VLIW, or pretty much anything else on this topic.
The issue isn't whether or not there's a compiler available. The issue is how GOOD the compiler is. In the case of a Very Large Instruction Word (VLIW) CPU like the Itanium, the compiler is the bottleneck for system performance. Why? Because the premise of these CPUs is that while they have a low clockspeed (750-800 MHz for Itanium), they execute many instructions per cycle - 10 or more. So while "slower", they get more done per cycle, resulting in a faster overall execution. It's up to the compiler to properly structure the executable machine code to take maximum advantage of this layout and keep all execution units of the CPU busy at all times, as well as reduce disseparate memory accesses and so forth.
The intial compilers that are released with these machines do it, but not as well as they could. In fact, compiler writers are still trying to grasp the issues with pipelining on modern CPUs and their much lower number of execution units, and this is without utilizing special instructions that explicitly do non-conflicting operations at once. We're still years away from writing fully optimized compilers for contemporary CPUs. And while there's been a great deal of work done on VLIW already (prior to Itanium), there's even more yet to be done. A decade for a "good" compiler is probably optimistic.
You may be wondering, what's the point anyway? If VLIW is so damn hard, why bother? Just ramp up that clock speed and get more CPU power! Well, that's nice, but it doesn't work in reality. We're starting to bump up against physical limitations in CPU speeds. Electrons are not magical particles that travel instantaeously. They are limited to slightly under the speed of light, which means roughly 1 cm per nanosecond. This doesn't seem to be a big deal until you realize that a 2.0 GHz CPU means each clock cycle is 0.5 nanoseconds. So if you have to fetch an instruction or data from main memory, and that memory is a mere 5 cm away, under optimal conditions you've just sat around for 10 clock cycles waiting on that memory to be fetched. This is ignoring the fact that there's propogation delays, latch delays, and other things. So go ahead, pump that CPU up to 10 GHz and waste even more clock cycles waiting on data. That or redesign the entire thing, expect the compiler to do the work and properly feed you data and instructions such that you can do 10x as much in the same amount of time, and all with no wasted CPU instructions.
That's the theory at least.
Reality is that not only does the compiler have to properly organize the machine code, it also has to have some idea of what the code is doing to do so. Compile the code w/ profiling, run the code against a "realistic" data set, then recompile it again feeding it the profile data. Many compilers can do this now, but it's rarely done. Because it's hard to guess a "realistic" data set, it's hard to acquire the same, how you expect the code to be used and how it actually is used are rarely the same, and there's more development time involved in all of this. So most companies don't bother. And despite what I said above, 2.0 GHz still hasn't reached the point where the CPU is sitting on it's ass more than it's doing work. Until we start approaching that point there's little incentive to put in the R&D time necessary to switch to a new CPU archictecture.
And, of course, on top of all of the above is the issue that Joe Sixpack will invariably see 2 GHz as faster than 750 MHz no matter what. Have fun with that one.
No, you can't build something like a Netfinity (oops. er - xSeries eServer) in your garage for $2k. Built into a high-level xSeries is:
1) Hot-pluggable power supplies, drives, and PCI - slots.
2) Built-in hot-plug SCSI
3) Integrated service processor for diagnostics (essentially a computer within a computer)
4) Extremely well-tested box. (Very important to do integration testing on high-end units.)
5) Very nice, serviceable, rack-mount chassis
6) Crap-load of PCI slots
7) Light-path diagnostics. (Lets somebody without training figure out what's broke.)
8) IBM Director
9) Well-designed cooling that would be impossible to achieve with a garage box. (Do you know how to do airflow modeling?)
10) Support.
The list goes on...
Yes, they will become a commodity, in that you will be able to get them from multiple major manufacturers, but don't expect to build it yourself in your basement anytime soon.
SirWired
Fud, fud, fud. I can't speak for the other companies but Sun can easily afford to fund R&D on the next generation SPARC chip, they've got 6 billion $ cash in hand. Let alone investments, and have done for over 2 years. BTW the current generation is UltraSPARCIII, UltraSPARCIV is just a fabrication improvement. Work is already underway on UltraSPARCV's design. Sun's crown jewels are SPARC/Solaris, when Sun stops working on their own OS/CPU/Server platform it's time to stop investing in them.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
4X AGP is a 32-bit 266 MHz bus. That's more throughput than possible with PCI.
Unless you buy into Intel's PCI-X, which is 64/133.
And most graphics cards are not limited by bus bandwidth with *any* flavour of AGP (see the various Tom's Hardware benchmarks). The usual limit is fill rate for new cards, and lack of geometry processing for old cards (assuming you're playing a new game). Textures are stored on-card by any sane game, so the only thing going across the bus is lists of triangles.
AGP doesn't have contention with other devices on the bus so it doesn't have to do any logic for mastering or controlling and can allocate all its clocks to doing a data transfer.
While this would be an issue for very short data transfers, graphics cards will likely be transferring large batches of data. This is done in burst mode, which gives one transfer per clock.
Why would you want PCI? The only advantage PCI gives is that you can hang multiple devices off of it. But while that lets you get multiple monitor support easier, it will really kill your limited bandwidth.
You have bandwidth to spare; all you'd be doing in a multi-monitor setup is sending the same triangle lists over the bus, not cutting and pasting image data or doing texturing. Have one one dominant card and leave the others snooping traffic, and you have zero extra overhead for this.
The real benefit of having multiple video cards is that it lets you easily do render farming for things like games. Have each card render half the screen, and copy all cards' partial renderings to one card's frame buffer. 32/33 PCI is too slow to be practical for this, but 64/66 has more than enough bandwidth. I studied the feasibility of this at one of my past jobs.