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."

Comments

Compilers

[Ted Maul]

I gather that the Itanium philosophy is to transfer the complexity to the compiler. The question is, how good are the compilers now? At the moment, it looks like a real bastard of a job putting together a decent one for any Itanium series. That VLIW stuff looks like it needs to be spot on every time to get the performance (don't do 3 fp ops in a row).

When I can run my C++ through an Itanium compiler and have it come out good, then I'll believe it. Benchmarks? Right.