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Intel Itanium 2 Benchmarks
Pablo writes "Over at VR-Zone we saw some
interesting benchmarks of the upcoming Intel Itanium 2 processor codenamed
McKinley that is on schedule to be launched during second half of this year.
With a faster 3MB on-die L3 cache, 6 instructions/cycle and 6.4GB/s of
bandwidth, it is poised to perform at 1.5-2x of the current Itanium processor.
There is an overview of how the Intel Itanium 2 at 1Ghz clock frequency will
perform against the current Itanium 800Mhz and Sun's Ultra Sparc III RISC
processor."
This is just a Marketing Piece put out by intel. All the "Benchmarks" are proposed Estimates. And why would a dinky website get a hold of something this "Big"? Dont know just questions.
Mod Me down Please
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
At here.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Itanium2 still uses old and slow shared bus.
In 4-way configuration, each CPU gets only 1.6GB/s shared I/O and memory bandwidth.
UltraSparc III has 2.4GB/s memory bandwidth + some I/O bandwidth for each CPU.
Sledgehammer will have 5.4GB/s memory bandwidth for each CPU
I like the part where they said that Itanium 2 has 2x the SPECint performance of the original Itanium, since they never published it!! The SPECint performance for Itanium was so bad that only published SPECfp data!
It's just the same thing that happened when IBM published the SPECint/fp for POWER 4 processors. They only publish the data using 1 processor on the p690, so they run the hole SPEC benchmark suite un the 128MB SRAM cache memory, avoiding using regular DRAM. The easy way to see this is that they never published any SPECrate number, so to avoid showing that they don't scale as all processors start competing for the cache.
Sun USIII 1050MHz is almost 54% faster that USII 750MHz, as anyone can check going to the SPEC page (Sun Blade 1000 Model 1750 against Sun Blade 2050), with a 40% clock speed-up (this 14% increment is due to the compiler). This is exaclty the same processor at a faster clock, while Itanium 2 has more cache and a different architecture that Itanium, so a 1.5x to 2x speedup is less than spectacular, I will said.
For transaction processing, thay don't give any clue to show where they get the info from. While they expect to get the best OLTP number for 4-way systems, I don't think they will be able to surpass the AlphaServer ES45 MoDel 68/1000, which is by far the best 4-way system ever. What's worst, WLIW is know for been a poor performer for OLTP, and a great performer for floating-pont (that's why the only publisehd SPECfp!!). They never published any OLTP benchmark for Itanium (nor SAP, Peoplesoft, ORACLE, or even the raped PTC-C), so you can have an idea of how poor it is...
As of today, Fijutso PrimePower with 128 SPARC processors is the faster OLTP server ever (both SAP and TPC-C numbers!), with IBM p690 a close second for TPC-C and Sun SF15K a close second for SAP SD2-tier. Intel never showed in this kind of performance numbers, and Itanium certainly won't (unless while they keep running Windows).
No, HP clearly said that IPF (the official name for IA64 now) is going to completely replace PA-RISC / Alpha / Mips in the next 5-10 years.
The market has decided already. It voted for "cheaper", and even HP can't spend the money to keep those other processors competitive without pricing its machines out of the market.
I don't give more than 5 years to Sparc