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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."
...Itanium 2 processor codenamed McKinley that is on schedule... :-p
:-)))
Yea, that's if you forget the part about the first itanium being about a billions years late.
Honestly, I am anxious to see what will come out of this war between AMD and Intel for the desktop market. Too bad they didn't have a comparison between McKinley and AMD's SledgeHammer, since they are destined to the same market.
And I would have posted earlier, but I was slowed down by the slashdot effect!!!
But what's with all the stuff regarding MS urging Intel to use AMD's x86-64? Isn't the future of IA-64 rather bleak right now? Even HP apparently says that "market will decide" whether PA-RISC or IA-64 will be their future Unix platform... Which would not be the case if IA-64 was obviously superior.
Well, this can only mean good for Linux...
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
x86-64 may be more of a desktop migration point, but there are still plenty of IA64 type applications waiting in the wings from Microsoft, IBM and others.
There is always Linux64.
Not to mention the fact that many a beowolf supercomputer would like to be designed on a Itanium 2. There is one at NCSA from IBM with 800 some IA64 chips. They're just waiting for the Itanium2.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
It seems that in comparison to finding ways to rev up the clock speed, PC-based innovation in processors has stagnated -- at least as far as those innovations that actually reach the market.
Perhaps I'm just picky.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
Personally I like how each page in the ppt presentations used a slightly different USIII ranging from 800 to 1050Mhz. Hmm smells like marketing picked out the best from a bunch of (simulated?) benchmarks. Everything was labeled 'simulated' or 'estimated'.
... still competitive I think ... taking over ... going the way of the dodo (im really sad about this) ... transitioning to Itanium ... never really liked them for big compute stuff, lets hope SGI can turn things around. ... still competitive in performance but AFAIK to get a high end system you need to give your first born to IBM. And, IMO not really designed for the HPC kind of stuff I'm interested in. ... ? I've heard of some really cool stuff being developed, i'll believe it when I see it.
Nothing to see here folks please move along.
Well other than the slow death of competing high end architectures.
Lets see here we have:
SPARC
Itanium
Alpha
PA-RISC
MIPS
Power4
Cray
What eles is out there? I haven't really been in the market for a high end system in a while, but it feels like the market is shrinking and soon Itanium will be "the choice," unless legacy support is a concern .
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
And why in each benchmark does the speed of the UltraSparc 3 keep changing?
800,750,900,1050 yet the Itanium 2 stays the same speed.
Even the graph has been done by a marketing guy.
They sorted the benchmark results in ascending order and the connected the data points of completely different and independet benchmarks by a line!
What shall the line tell you? The faker the benchmark the better the results? Or
"This is a line graph that doesn't make sense at all. But look: It shows an increase, increase is good, so Itanion 2 is good!"
lets see INTEL go up aganst a SUN on a large oracle DB then I will take notice
Actually, Intel systems do pretty well, indeed, better than Sun running Oracle with a 3000G test database. And they do a good job on transaction throughput too.
It's hard to generate decent code for the IA64 so building a good JIT for it requires a very large investment. Furthermore the JIT compiler would probably be quite slow so it would have to run longer or achieve larger speedups for it to pay off.
... which IA64 doesn't have.
Although a JIT would be able to discover and exploit behavior patterns that didn't show up until runtime (and therefore not exploitable by a static compiler), it's not a panacea. Lots of programs are unpredictable even down to the level of individual loop iterations. Such programs really need small branch penalties and hardware support for instruction reordering
Since when are Intel's own PowerPoint slides accepted as "benchmark numbers"? These are far too vague to be statistically meaningfull, especially considering they don't come from an independent source. I have no doubts that the Mcikley (Itanium 2) kicks major booty, but I'm rather disappointed in all the hoopla over what's basically a marketing presentation from Intel. Someone post independent benchmark numbers and let us all know about them...don't waste our time with Intel's or Sun's or AMD's own PowerPoint slides.
"So it'll actually run even faster than the benchmarks let on once out of beta."
Bullshit. You don't know this, and Intel's history with new processor development suggests otherwise. Maybe this means that they finally have the heat issue under control, and can *finally* reach the clockrates they want to advertise. Maybe it means clock distribution is reducing chip performance to the point that heat isn't an issue. Maybe it means that you work for Intel marketing, and think you are repeating something you heard an Intel engineer saying at a party.
-Paul Komarek