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Itanium Problems
webdev writes "An article in today's NYTimes (free but...) highlights some industry concerns over Itanium. The author suggests the normal "what's bad for Intel is bad for the computer industry". Anyone know the power consumption for IBM's 64 bit effort GPUL?"
need backwards compatilibty! (fp)
But what?!
I'd venture to say that IBM's processor uses little more power than other PowerPC CPUs. Doesn't it sport SOI and other technologies to limit heat production? Heck, for an--albeit moderately poor--example of this is IBMs 750FX processor vs. the P4. At the same clock speed, the 750FX would consume roughly one fourth the power of the P4.
The Political Programmer
Because this thing really should be called the Itanic...
intel
NOT
inside
$cat
I mean, they put out good stuff, but they are clearly outmached in the 64-bit arena. Maybe the reason they took so long to move beyond 32-bits had less to do with preserving compatibility than it did with an inability to design a new chip.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Thanks to Google...
u its/29CHIP.html?ex=1033963200&en=3b60e461ca6b0684& ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/29/technology/circ
dead as DivX.
Can we use now the term "vaporware" for hardware as well as software ?
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Excuse the "Office Space" Rip off be here goes: "For every descision you make you have to ask yourself 'Is this good for Intel?'"
If it rocks (I.E. fast) and is a reasonable price, I'll look into it. If it proves to stand up to the test, I'll buy it. I have seen enough of "the next new thing"s come and go, as has everyone else hip to the game (computing). All of the hype and marketing means dick to me now days.
"It has taken an entire decade, an estimated $5 billion and teams of hundreds of engineers from the two companies to bring the first Itanium chip to market. As the struggles and costs mount for the companies, skeptical technologists say Itanium now has the hallmarks of a bloated project in deep trouble. It is already four years behind schedule, emerging just as companies are in no mood to spend money on technology"
Skeptical? More like, forget it Chachi, it ain't happening.
I guess the larger companies don't get it. Corporations are struggling. Companies are in holding patterns, waiting for the mess, erm, economy, to level off.
Can I have a job now making millions being a skeptical technologist?
Sent from your iPad.
...friend!
I'm part of a team of people working on a largish supercomputer using itanium2. The things are fast fast fast. Much faster than i anticipated. it's special purpose I think, which is why it defies industry logic
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I just read a story on msnbc.com about AMD's 64bit processor, I close the window, check slashdot and there is the story about Intels Itanium. Anyway here is the link for msnbc. http://www.msnbc.com/news/813950.asp?0si=-
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
"Every big computing disaster has come from taking too many ideas and putting them in one place, and the Itanium is exactly that," said Gordon Bell, a veteran computer designer and a Microsoft researcher."
He should follow that up by saying, "Here at Microsoft we have proved this time and time again."
Intel.
I got a 1600 on the SATs.
the last quote from the article seems like a big duh to me. 'If it doesn't save us money we have no intrest in it'. Well yeah, if you buy something and it costs more for you to have it then it provides in value to you, then you should probably not buy it in the first place. This is common knowledge.
That said, 64-bit processing just doesn't seem to be needed for the majority of tasks yet. We've had 64-bit computers for years now and it's not like there is a great demand for them. If you needed a 64-bit computer before, then you've already got one and everyone in 32-bit land is fine and happy. Until Doom 3 requires a 64-bit processor to play, then the common man will not need a 64-bit processor.
In the common PC, the major bottlenecks are the RAM and hard drive anyway, not the CPU.
Am I only one laughing my ass off that I got an Intel banner above this article's view?
http://www.hp.com/products1/itanium/performance/ar chitecture/speccpu.html
-Kevin
I submitted this a couple weeks ago, but I guess it didn't make the grade:
AMD's x86-64 architecture will allow companies to upgrade individual parts of their software systems to 64-bit without having to replace everything else. That's the key to AMD's future success; it makes the migration path to 64-bit that much easier (and that much cheaper).
Itanium flopped before; chances are good it will flop again.
just makes you wonder if we'll still be using x86 compatible chips in the year 3029...
Non-Reg Link Thanks to Google News.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The only problem with the Itanium 2 is that Intel is only offering it in a high end configuration with lots of cache. The chip itself when you normalize for cache costs about as much as the P4. GCC already supports the Itanium and Intel has great code they could give to GCC in terms of optomization (Intel doesn't make money in the compiler business). Apple is looking for a new chip and IBM doesn't work out this is a great place to go. Grabbing Linux, BSD and Apple will put tremendous pressure on Microsoft.
The article itself doesn't mention any problem with the chip other than electricity usage and heat which are both a product of the large amount cache on the current configuration.
Only if you try to overclock it.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
A freaking 130 Amp Chip?
Even with 220 million transistors in it that is a lot of power. Intel should consider that big companies and small users dint always want the BEST of the BEST, they want something that is cost effective. As the story mentions Google might prefer to use a lower power chip because they could save millions in power costs. This can apply to small users too as that chip alone could cost you up to $100 a month.
Think on the bright side, during the winter when you are on doom 3 you are also heating the house!
Medevo
I don't think most people use datacentres to play Doom, you know...?
The Itanium is not meant to be a desktop chip. The problem is, it can't seem to cut it as server chip either (too expensive, too power-hungry).
You say there's no demand for 64-bit chips? I wonder why Sun and IBM are still in business, then...
RMN
~~~
He's absolutely correct. The most intelligent thing to do is to make insignificant, incremental changes, and charge customers full price for each of them.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
One very good reason for 64-bit processors which is often overlooked is that one needs processors with more than 32-bits in order to use more than 2Gb of RAM. With only 32-bits one is not able to adress a larger RAM.
Aplications using large amounts of RAM ar getting more common by the day so unless we get low price(!) 64-bit processors on the market soon there will be an annoying ceiling for many applications.
We've ported chemistry simulation code to the pre-release ITA-2, and run benchmarks. There's not much like it, performance-wise, and on a cycle/dollar scale, it's in a class by itself. Smokes US-IIIs, walks away from the Alpha, and keeps pace handily with the Power4, at a more academicly-tolerable price. It's a good chip in its second incarnation, and has the misfortune to be introduced during a recession.
As always, the NYT ignored that you'll need the 64-bit address space for large applications, it has excellent memory bandwidth, and those customers requiring such a system weren't explicitly interviewed or mentioned. The heat issue is true, and that's it's one failing, but as with the Alpha, it will get better in time. (I still remember the rumors, pre-release of the Alpha that DEC was going to have to build a liquid-cooled workstation)
The emergence of the 64bit chip market is pretty exciting, even to an ignoramus like me, but this article got me thinking about some things. The whole power consumption issue is really undervalued I think. We've gotten to the point that most chips are fast and powerful (strength) enough to do tasks efficiently. But I've heard that specialized chips are more efficient at lower clock speeds and power consumption but suffer from their rigor and restriction to a certain type of processing. Maybe its time to give specialized chips their due and move flexibility off the chip itself and into multi-proc (using different specialized chips) or even multi-machine situations.
Of course faster is always better in database mining and protein folding and nuclear explosion modeling, but I wonder if the field isn't ripe for a move away from generalized powerhouse chips to more specialized chips that run at lower clock speeds (perhaps) and have lower power consumption (a must). Personal computing made advances due to cheap general use chips, but as our computers become specialized appliances, a move towards specializing the insides makes sense to me.
Itanium seems to me to be too late to the party. Its an old school chip and probably/ perhaps a badassed one at that. But computer users, from desktop to database, are likely to appreciate specialized chips in multiprocessor or multimachine configurations that express the flexibility. I don't know if its possible, but on the desktop side, rather than have a 3 Ghz general chip, maybe two cheaper and less power hungry 2 Ghz chips each with a unique specialization for certain types of tasks might perform better. One chip to rule them all is so last century.
Regardless of the feasibility of what I've said, lower power consumption is really cool (no pun intended, honestly). Just because it doesn't have an exhaust pipe port doesn't mean that the computer doesn't pollute.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.
...can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
In fact, I know from a reliable source that tomorrow the president of the USA is going to reveal that the Iraqi army has managed to get hold of 2000 Itanium chips and is threatening to turn them all on and melt the Earth.
RMN
~~~
Heaven knows they have a copy of MS's book on corporate behaviour when it comes to competitors.
Bad for Intel probably means good for the industry, as we won't have another half-assed chip shoved down our throats.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
using as many 10 watt bulbs as that thing would light...
Seriously, is efficency no longer even considered?
I live in a giant bucket.
There's something even above compatibility (migration path) - namely Moore's law. The goal #1 goal of a CPU company is staying on Moore's curve. Now the problem with x86 is that it is a f*cked up instruction set architecture, and because of its monstruosities (8 registers ? stack-based FP ?) it has become a major hurdle in staying on Moore's curve. Good luck to AMD with their 64 bit thing ... I seriously doubt that their 64 bit chip will be any faster than their own Athlon (going from 16 to 32 bits registers is a big deal, from 32 to 64 not so much)
The Raven
The Raven
We have an early model of the Itanium ( given to us free by HP ;-).
The beast has a 220V power line coming into it, and we've decided that the reason its so heavy is that if it was lighter, the fans would propel it across the room like a jet engine.
show me
Getting ia64 optimizations intp gcc is not just a matter of pulling some code from icc and plugging it in. The truth of the matter is that gcc just isn't set up to do the kinds of aggressive optimizations they're doing in icc. Maybe in a few years it will.
How does the New York Times figure that Intel has spent 10 years on the Itanium? Unless they consider the "-ium" naming convention part of their research.
I think he's very right. Take for instance SMP. A single threaded application running on an SMP system has no advantage over the same app running on a single processor system.
In the same way, most applications aren't even aware of 64 bits. So they will continue adding, multiplying, and addressing memory in 32 bits -- whether they be binary ports, or actually recompiled versions.
For the lazy man's migration path of using the same apps on a 64 bit system, there will be no advantage whatsoever of using a 64 bit system.
On the other hand, if you are recompiling, you might as well switch to the EPIC instruction set (Itanium), and get a defacto performance boost -- even if you don't port the code to be 64 bit aware... that's something you won't get even if you recompile for 64 bit CISC opteron.
And last, if you are refactoring, or re-designing your app for 64 bits, there is no migration path per se.
So I think it all boils down to: power consumption (for google), marketing strategy (ie. hyping strategy), and economy.
...when people like google start to say that they're interested in anything other than increasing performance.
I realize it's their job to look out for their bottom line, but a scientific revolution is occuring now because cheap, high-performance commodity parts can be joined into the time-old slashdot favorite, the beowolf. When companies start saying they are interested in anything other than increasing performance, it hurts this trend. If the next generation of commodity chips stagnate WRT performance, scientists are screwed.
Where I work, we had about ~10 processors available locally for research until we got a beowolf cluster - it was just too expensive to get many more - now we have 48. And they're all damned fast.
You business types may not have realized it, but you helped subsidize science as intel, amd, and the lot competed to make the next record-breaking processor.
For those among us too lazy to copy and paste.
A most elusive member of the periodic table
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
you fucking niggiot...
As an ex-Itanic designer, I can't help but get a warm fuzzy feeling every time I read bad news about Itanic. I sat there for years and watched upper-middle management screw over the project (and each other) in order to advance their careers. The only escape (especially after they froze internal job transfers) most of us grunts got was a job at a new company.
I went into Merced with all the hope and excitement of a new engineer. I left hating the profession and the management that controls it.
Regardless of how much Intel stock makes up my portfolio, I hope Itanic crashes and burns. I hope Yamhill (64-bit x86, designed in Oregon) succeeds flawlessly. I am way too cynical to believe it'll happen but, I hope the success of Yamhill forces Barrett to realize the uselessness of Santa Clara design, causing him to shut it down and rely on Oregon design to do it right. But, considering that Gary Thomas was "punished" for his failures on Itanic by being given a ton of options and a cushy job in Intel-Folsom, Itanic and Santa Clara "mis-design" will just continue along.
Of course, I am just a bitter old engineer taking cheap shots.
Long live Itanic, Intel's Verdun!
The Itanium relies heavily on exceedingly good compilers that will perform for the IA64 the same level of optimization that regular, on-the-fly predictive optimization do in RISC chips.
The main obstacle with this method is that Turing's theorem says static compile-time optimization will never work as well as dynamic optimization. This is because, roughly, the only way to guess what a program will do with a given set of input data is to execute it with its actual data set. Here is a link where a reader of The Register addressed this concern in 1999.
Is anyone aware of how well the limits predicting by Turing can apply to the compile-time IA64 algorithms?
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
If your lazy
NYT contrasted I2 with AMD's upcoming 64 bit offering quite prominently.
The number one value of a 64 bit CPU, to my mind, is the ability for it to address more than 4G of RAM, without destroying locality, like the PAE does on 32 bit processors.
PAE, for those of you who are, as yet, unaware of it, allows you to access more than 4G of physical RAM, by reviving an old technique called "bank selection". It's fairly useless for most of the applicaitons for which you would want more RAM in the first place, since it doesn't increase the allowable size of the kernel or process virtual address space at all, so the only thing it lets ou do is use RAM instead of swap, and not run lots of applications at the same time, without a lot of VM changes.
Intel keeps trying to sell us Itanium on performance, when, in fact, we don't care. What we care about is the ability to operate on larger data sets.
Intel: just because your delivery of access to larger amounts of physical RAM on 32 bit processors, via the PAE, was not welcomed (mostly because it was implemented in a way that was totally useless to software engineers and OS designers), doesn't mean that access to more RAM *by a single kernel or process* will not be the major selling point for Itanium: it will.
Get your crap together, and quit concentrating on clock rates.
-- Terry
The nytimes needs google *much* than google needs the nytimes. Without the nyt - google *still* has thousands of news sources - without google, the nyt looses probably 20 to 30% of the page views they would get otherwise.
Besides, all that is being "subverted" is the moronic registration process, something that the nyt willingly gives up for google news readers
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
Who says that open-source software has to be compiled by GCC. It doesn't. If you don't shell out, you're SOL. Sorry, maybe you shouldn't be using it.
Intel's compilers come with a 30-day trial IIRC.
On the other hand, why should GCC even expect anything in return from Intel. You can't expect everything for free in this world, no matter how much RMS may think this to be the case.
If you do real work, you need to pay the $$$ for a real compiler.
If you don't have the money for icc, you probably don't need it.
He forgot where.
GPUL the stupidest name for a processor? What were they thinking?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
...and because of its monstruosities (8 registers ? stack-based FP ?) it has become a major hurdle in staying on Moore's curve...
Could have fooled me. It seems like just yesterday that MIPS said they would change the world. Not buying it, this time around.
C//
I have been using Alpha 64-bit cpus for years now without problems. Why can't we all just use Alphas ?
Allegedly large data centers such as Google are sensitive to power consumption. Of course we are not just taking about the power consumption of the processor. We are also taking about the power needed to keep the boxes cool as well as the power that is needed run the air conditioner to cool the data room at about a 20% efficiency. What this means is that several watts of energy must be used to cool each watt used by the computer equipment.
I agree that Itanium may have misjudged the market for this chip. If AMD can produce a chip that is almost as good, but much more efficient, it may well be more economical to buy three AMD based machines instead of two Intel based machines. This becomes even more possible as a box becomes a single disposable commodity component in a very large networked array. Much like the auto industry, it may be practical to build inefficient cars when energy prices are low, but it is nevertheless a risky venture.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Now the problem with x86 is that it is a f*cked up instruction set architecture, and because of its monstruosities (8 registers ? stack-based FP ?) it has become a major hurdle in staying on Moore's curve.
Huh, that's really interesting. I'd say Intel and AMD have been doing a pretty good job. If what you say is true how come we aren't all running RISC computers now? Well, in a way we are. Today's AMD and Intel chips are not truly CISC anymore. Might wanta read up on the features of CISC and RISC and then read the specs on a K7 or P4.
There's one thing Inever understood about Intel's and AMD's design for 64-bits CPUs. Intel seems to aim for simplicity, that is, 64-bits code should be clean, as compared to current x86 code. AMD, on the other hand, seems to be mainly concerned about downward compatibility (which is a huge win). But why not have it both ways? The CPU could just start out in 16-bit stone age legacy mode, and then be switched to 64-bits mode, similar to how today's x86en are switched to 32-bits mode. The 64-bits code could then be clean like Intel proposes, and we'd all be happy. Of course, it would effectively mean having two CPUs on one chip, one for legacy code, and one for modern code, but isn't that what's happening anyway? Last thing I want to say: clean 64-bits code makes me think MIPS.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Specialized processor chips already exist, and they're even found in home computers. Check out the specs on Nvidia and ATI graphics chips.
Saddest sentence in the whole article:
"There are other benefits for Hewlett-Packard. The Itanium allows the company to eliminate both of its current 64-bit chips -- the H.P. PA-RISC and Compaq Alpha. That alone should save the company $200 million to $400 million annually in development and manufacturing costs, according to Steven M. Milunovich, an analyst at Merrill Lynch."
Yeah, HP and Compaq have been fine stewards of their engineering legacy...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
"It may not be as simple as people think it is to take advantage of a 64-bit processor," he said.
Well, IBM seemed to do it really well with the Power4. Perhaps IBM is just better than you, hmm, hmm?
Yeah, I thought so.
I'd give Intel engineers just a bit more credit than the average /. poster. Intel has been right at getting the trends for awhile now. Take the Pentium 4 for example. Everyone thought it would flop cuz it had crappy IPC. It sucked in the first several iterations (less than 2 GHz). But its quite the speed demon now, ain't it?
As for Itanium, there are quite a few ways it could succeed. It has the potential for serious performance. The super-wide architecture is perfect for code like scientific processing, image processing, and 3D graphics that are nice, regular, and easy to optimize and parallize. And what kind of processing do you think is going to be popular in the future?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
...so I'm gonna troll Slashdot! Now go suck "teh manham" like a good li'l karma whore.
What's bad for Intel is bad for the computer industry? Intel may have their fingers in a lot of things, but if Intel (and for that matter MS) disappeared tomorrow, the computer industry would survive. AMD would love that, I'm sure... they would not only be the de facto standard on x86-64, but on x86, in general. And hopefully AMD would hurry up and release a mobile Duron or XP with really low power consumption, enough to be put in a PDA along with plenty of AMD's flash memory too (come on, ya know many of you would love an x86 PDA that you could run windows, freebsd, linux, etc. on with minimal changes)...
And of course, Apple would love that too, hehe
Go ahead and mod me down, I'll only post more...
IA64 will have the edge for about 6 months. After that Power4 (next rev) will leap over IA64 with a minimum of disruption because it is already 64 bit.
Then Intel will go back to their day job of manufacturing chips in incremental 25% improvements. Intel will reach the limits of power consumption before they reach the manufacturing tolerance limit.
Troll I could understand. Flamebait I could understand. But offtopic? Dumbnuts. Crack pipe smokers, the lotta you. Anyway, you're supposed to mod good comments up, not bad comments down. Eejits. What is the world coming to, anyhow? I mean, the worst terrorist attack in US history happened a little over a year ago, and you people are talking about a feckin' lump of copper on a wafer of silicon! For chrissakes, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
Morality is the penury of faith and trust and the beginning of confusion
I Ching
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
google for itanic, and you'll begin to see why.
the continuing campaign is just throwing good
money after bad. now is AMD's time to shine.
i'm considering doing my next project closed source
just so that i can release it exclusively as
opteron-only, because i love being right.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Didn't you read Cryptonomicon.
Once people discover that its 130 watts of power dissipation can fry eggs perfectly, Intel will make tons of money in the high-end cooking appliances market.
Dynamic optimization is not restricted to hardware. Java Hotspot will do well with Itanium (if Sun survives), and I believe Smalltalk and LISP have dynamic optimization as well. The way I see it, Virtual Machines are the future of high performance computing. And yes, .NET is important for Microsoft to prosper in the non-IA32 world. (Although I hate it when the wicked prosper.)
The P4 was an initial disaster for Intel--the cpu hardly anybody wanted. But it wasn't just because of its low performance and IPC, it was because of its dependence on Rdram in the beginning. A mistake which Intel has since remedied.
The fact is that for the past three years Intel has done a lot more wrong than right, stretching all the way back to the infamous re-called 1.13GHz P3--it's the first time in my memory that a shipping cpu was ever recalled by the manufacturer.
In fact, it wasn't until the Northwood P4 2.53GHz variant that Intel started doing some things "right"--and that's been for only a few months now. Basically, It took Intel until Northwood to catch AMD's Athlon in performance, and the clock started ticking in 1999--so it took Intel the better part of 3 years to catch the Athlon.
Everybody knew that the low IPC in the P4 would be made up for, eventually, in sheer clock speed--that wasn't debated as far as I can recall. What hardly anyone suspected was that AMD would be able to extend the Athlon architecture so well against Intel's Pentium architectures. Indeed, with a new stepping of the Thoroughbred core which started shipping only last week, The Athlon holds its own against the P4 and will do so up to the 3GHz level and maybe beyond. After that comes Hammer, which supposedly will start shipping at close to the MHz range where Athlon XP leaves off, ~2.4GHz. Only thing is that Hammer will be at least 25% faster than Athlon XP clock for clock, which makes it considerably faster than NOrthwood clock for clock, yet it will have no trouble scaling up in MHz.
OK, it's Sunday night and I'm rambling so good night all.
Fuck drdink and I said to fuck him in his stupid ass!
I always wondered why Sun was putting a great deal of emphasis on power consumption on their new line of processors. In retrospect, I see why. Smaller blade servers, which allows you to pack a lot of servers into a small space. And power consumption, which if it is very high, eats into the TCO. Oddly enough, it looks like the SPARCs may be playing the game better than you'd think.
Not CISC?
Why do they need a micro code parser before commands enter the pipeline then?
They are using a special microcode cache to improve on speed on the PIV.
Why do they have to make things so complex?
Complexity costs money.
Occam!
Processors are being clocked higher and the transistor count is increasing all the time. So unless some energy saving technology or some other radical ideas are developed I can see all processors being 100watt monstrosities before long. Intel recently demonstrated a 4GHz P4, what use will such a processor be when we still talk about 333 or 400Mhz memory buses?
www.dancingbaby.com
Yeah fuck drdink in his stupid ass.
-- drdink's mom getting ready to beat drdink for being bad
My name is Sean Kelly I fuck YOU in the ass!
With an icepick. In your eye socket. From your gramma's urethra. ha ha! I made another drdink joke.
Heat Shortage Coming?
with all the talk of needing low power and the only alternative discussed being AMD, what about Transmeta? Wheres Crusoe in all this mess?
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
No drdink, the sad part is that the comments I made are just immitations of what you do all fucking day and night long in #Slashdot yet youre too fucking dumb to realize it.
And what's even more sad is that it's most likely the only joy YOU have. I would tell you in irc but you'd akill me from your shitty network. You probably are crying because you wont quit bitching about it. Not too mentipn everybody hates you.
Spelling and grammer errors added to this post intensionally to hidez0r stile.
Hey, at least you get 16 GPR with x86-64.
i've always given credit to the intel engineers. they make a decent chip.
it's the greedy, bloodsucking, corporate intel suits that take a page from microsoft's handbook that i don't give credit to.
with alternative architectures falling by the way side, and an all intel world as a possibility that sits on the horizon...how about you take note.
Personally I think Windows/Intel/Dell power-triangle is powerful enough.
I like choices, and if you support the trifecta, then I am against you. Because you are against choices.
...friend
So let me get this straight, the new Intel's require a complete hardware shift in order to be useful, just like Apple. Both have 64 bit chips in the works. For the first time Apple, Sun, IBM et al will be on a level playing field with Intel. If Intel succeeds with Itanium then none of the software owned by any company will run, necessitating purchase of a new OS, programs, ect. Doesn't this realy put Apple, Sun and IBM in an interesting position? For the first time companies will see a level playing field. I would hope companies see this as a golden time to dump x86/Intel architecture and go instead towards more open solutions. After all, they have to switch hardware and software anyway. Why not think different?
I think one of the main problems with Intels puch into the 64 bit world is that they are doing it at the same time that the software industry is moving in the direction of compiling code at run time, not ahead of time. Especially .NET will be affected by this. Since the IA-64 requires much longer to compile in an optimized way it will not work well with .NET and many other modern systems.
Martin
What about college football? What about the latest sports car (running good old GASOLINE, not ANTIMATTER)? I don't care about those. TECH TECH. Ignore me.
It's all well and good to be able to execute 4 instructions at once, but most systems spend a large portion of their time in library routines (strlen), function prolog/epilog, and so on. Even assuming that you are running some pretty hard number crunching code that can parallelize the inner loops, you are still starving all of the other threads/processes that could be running.
Why not just work on n-way SMP, so that an application can monopolize one or more processors and still have cycles to spare for mundane work.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
"Moore's curve" is price/performance. MIPS is still changing the world with embedded applications.
This chip is the successor to the Itanic. Therefore, I would propose to christen it the "Itanic Too"!
You'd think that if flexibility and power comsumption were as important as performance, then Transmeta would be all over this. The Crusoe chips are natively 128-bit, so it would be possible to write a 64-bit version of the Codemorphing software (based on Intel or AMD's 64-bit instruction set, or use their own). Since the chips are upgradeable, one could even design software for a new task, then upgrade the computers accordingly. But the crusoe chips aren't exactly speed demons. I think that if companies had to choose between transmeta and intel, they'd pick intel and live with the astrnomical power bills.
"The way to make money during the boom is to have built good products during the preceeding bust, and have them ready to sell once there is a market for them."
But is Itanium a good product? That was the question of this article. Even during a good economy there will not be a big market for Itanium because Intel just went into the wrong direction with it's design (bloatware). At least I believe so. And Intel agrees with predicions of a 10% market share of the server market.
Even in a good economy, people will just buy from competitors as Google is going to do (and Google has good economics already). With other X86 compatible processors or platform independent programming, it's a buyer's market and Itanium just doesn't seem to be the best buy.
I can applaud the decision to make a break from the old X86 architecture, but why did they design it as structurally complex bloatware?
First they head into the direction of more simplicity (switch to RISC core inside the CISC Pentiums) and then they double back into the complexity trap with Itanium.
Humans are just much better at improving simple things than they are at improving complex things. Why didn't they just go multi-core or something? I guess it's their CISC cultural heritage.
And if I may go slightly offtopic for a bit. I think there's something unelegant about those extremely power hungry chips. Something just doesn't feel right about the fact that your solid-state chip's continued existance is dependant on the oil on the ballbearings of a spinning bit of plastic, and that it's just a matter of time before your PC/server breaks.
A PC should be as solid-state as possible, just make sure electricity keeps going in and it runs. I think server farm cowboys/girls agree with me. They have better things to do than replace fans all day.
For this reason I like the Transmeta Crusoe, Via C3 and IBM G3.
However, even though it's power hungry, I do like the Intel Pentium 4's ability to survive the removal of it's heatsink, and continue running Q3 like nothing's happened when you put the heatsink back on. Could you underclock and undervolt a P4 3GHz to 1.5GHz and run it using a giant heatsink without a fan? I bet you can! At least it would survive.
- -- Truth addict for life.
Power4 is 64 bit. the AIX line uses it.
The chip in the article is meant to be a replacement for
the 32 bit powerPC line, which is a much lower end thing they use in Mac's.
Current Power4's have 4 64-bit processors in a multi-chip
package... see a review @ http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ibmpower4/
They put eight of those into a frame to make 32-way
SMP's.
This wouldn't be the first time Intel has screwed the pooch. Do a google on "iapx432" for something that turned out possibly even worse than Itanium might. (It was a nice chip design, on paper -- and it eventually met all its design goals, of which performance was not one, alas.)
-- Alastair
Last time I checked AMD was bad for Intel, and very good for the computer industry.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
In July last year, Intergraph (www.intergraph.com) brought a lawsuit against INTEL alleging the basic design of the Itanium violates ateleast two patents they had held for ten years. Intergraph alleges the concept of software based instruction routining in highly parallel architechtures was developed for their C5 (aka clipper) chip.
Itanium basic design is based on a HP concept for highly parallel processing in which the order of execution on the chip can actually create race conditions for dependencies in calculations. This allows performance enhancements and simplication of handshaking harware, since basically the chip does not have to wait for the slowest operations. INstead the job of preventing race conditions falls to the compiler. The compiler must model how the processor will execute an instruction in the context of the other instructions the chip will be executing in parallel and then re-order the micro-code to prevent erroneous computations.
It would appear the methodology for achieving this was patented by intergraph for the C5 chip. The C5 chip project was eventually abandoned and intergraph parteneres with intel to replace the CPU in their workstations with pentiums.
We all know that intel was previously accused of stealing the ALPHA processor designs and that law suit was "settled" by intel buying out the impoverished ALPHA (dec). This law suit is for 250 million dollars. which is about 5 % of the entire 5 billion dollar development const of the Itanium. Mediation talks have broken down so the Suit will presumable go ahead. If you are interested try a google search, there's lots of info out there as this trial has dragged on for over a year.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Of course you could, Quake3 runs fine at 750mhz
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
This remark is irrelevant. Yes, it's true if compile-time behavior is completely unpredictable despite information from past runs or runs of similar programs. In fact, this isn't the case: a very large range of dynamic behaviors (branch direction, aliasing behavior, `run-time constants') are predictable statically.
It may be true that the Itanium moves too much into the compiler. However, Turing's theorem has really nothing to offer us concerning this matter, in the same way that knowing that two algorithms are in P doesn't give us empirical numbers on which runs faster.
Further, this comment (and the comment on theregister) makes the error of assuming that the static optimizations performed by an IA64 compiler are precisely comparable to the dynamic optimizations done in hardware. They're really not. It's easy to come up with contrived situations where one does better than the other; for less biased results, wait and see how your favorite benchmark (or maybe even favorite application) runs on Itanium.
Ok I just cannabalised the sticker off a burned out P3 but it does show my disgust at Intel
Intel, Intergraph Fail in Mediation of Chip-Patent Dispute Intel Corp. said it failed to reach an agreement in a patent lawsuit by computer- services company Intergraph Corp., which already was paid $300 million by the world's biggest chipmaker to resolve an earlier dispute.
some info can be found here:7 0,146182,00.html
http://www.intergraph.com/intel/legalpic.asp
and
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/money/story/0,18
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Intel Corp. said it failed to reach an agreement in a $250 million dollar patent lawsuit by computer- services company Intergraph Corp., which already was paid $300 million by the world's biggest chipmaker to resolve an earlier dispute.
some info can be found here:7 0,146182,00.html
http://www.intergraph.com/intel/legalpic.asp
and
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/money/story/0,18
Today, Intel and intergraph anounced a break down in cour ordered mediation to resolve a quarter billion dollar patent infringement suit against the ITanium.
In July last year, Intergraph (www.intergraph.com) brought a lawsuit against INTEL alleging the basic design of the Itanium violates ateleast two patents they had held for ten years. Intergraph alleges the concept of software based instruction routining in highly parallel architechtures was developed for their C5 (aka clipper) chip.
Itanium basic design is based on a HP concept for highly parallel processing in which the order of execution on the chip can actually create race conditions for dependencies in calculations. This allows performance enhancements and simplication of handshaking harware, since basically the chip does not have to wait for the slowest operations. INstead the job of preventing race conditions falls to the compiler. The compiler must model how the processor will execute an instruction in the context of the other instructions the chip will be executing in parallel and then re-order the micro-code to prevent erroneous computations.
It would appear the methodology for achieving this was patented by intergraph for the C5 chip. The C5 chip project was eventually abandoned and intergraph parteneres with intel to replace the CPU in their workstations with pentiums.
We all know that intel was previously accused of stealing the ALPHA processor designs and that law suit was "settled" by intel buying out the impoverished ALPHA (dec).
This law suit is for 250 million dollars. which is about 5 % of the entire 5 billion dollar development const of the Itanium. Mediation talks have broken down so the Suit will presumable go ahead. If you are interested try a google search, there's lots of info out there as this trial has dragged on for over a year.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The itanium wasnt a bad chip either, if you got it for free.
VLIW is only really usefull when it is tied to the underlying architecture. To use VLIW as a scalable ISA is just a stupid idea.
however the right to freedom of speech also states that you are responsible for what you say, and he was, in this case wrong to publicly criticise his employer w/o first considering the result of his actions. this would be an entirely different thing (ie a violation of free speech) if it wasn't his employer and he was told to shut up about it.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
I like the submitter's comment:
Anyone know the power consumption for IBM's 64 bit effort GPUL?"
Why? Like power consumption is the most important spec on a processor. I can see the new Intel commercials now:
Introducing the Intel Itanium II!! You'll be the envy of all your friends with the Itanium II's ultra low power consumption!
Hmm, yeah, except all Moore's Law says is that the number of transistors will double every 18 months. I would say Intel has been doing a bang-up job so far.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
That's quite true for some architectures. However, note that the PowerPC CPU, for example, does a lot of optimizations at execution time with branch caching, speculative execution and other predictive techniques. This, on a code that has been somewhat optimized at compilation.
The question is not whether the IA-64 is the only processor to do these compile-time optimize. The question is whether it's wise to rely mainly on compile-time static optimization when you hope to be a performance leader. Turing says that you cannot, because static optimization, obtained by guessing the execution code path, is always inferior to dynamic optimization generated from the actual code path with the actual data.
Do you have pointers regarding the amount of dynamic optimization in the IA-64? In other words, if the compiler in only run-of-the-mill, can the IA-64 still perform?
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
after reading the bandwidth policy...
what if you 'trick' their servers in to thinking that your data is "educational" data being sent to or from UCI, maybe some sort of proxy or lan tunneling system... these are just shots in the dark, but I'm sure there is a way to fool it - or since web traffic is given high priority trade on port 80 and put the proper web headings at the front of the data sent to fool it!
It's interesting to ask what would have happened if he had put it in the bank. Bank interests vary over time but rarely get about 5% for many years. If one is genereous and supposes he could have gotten 4% interest (time averaged) then adter 68 years he would have 287$ for every 20$ he saved. Instead his gold is worth 300$. Looks like he was smart.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
2^36 = 2^4 (16) * 2^32 (4G) = 64G.
...bank selecting it in for the *entire duration* of the operation.
Also, the use of the extra 4 bits to get the full 36 bits requires use of the PAE.
Which, if you had ever read the processor manual, you would know requires *bank selection*.
Bank selection is incredibly useless. It doesn't let me have more than 4G of virtual address space split between user space and kernel space, combined.
Since I already have that with only 4G of RAM, and since the people who build servers that use that much memory aren't *stone stupid*, and tend to *dedicate* them to tasks, the extra RAM is basically useless.
The best you can get out of it is *a RAM disk*, and that still requires you copy crap all over.
You can't use the memory for *DMA buffers* or anything useful on which *the user process or the kernel operates*, without
The reason anyone want more address bits is to access more memory *simultaneously*, in a single program. If I were bumping my head on available RAM, I'd implement demand paging, and be done with it, wouldn't I? But that only works if I have the virtual address space to back the real memory *plus* the virtual memory, and I'm still limited to *32 bits* there, aren't I?
I guess maybe you are one of the Intel engineers who thought *bank selection* was a good idea?
Let me give you a clue: it's not.
Let me give you another clue: Segments are for worms: segment registers were a bad idea, too, which is why no one uses the damn things, except as extra registers ro hold things like thread contexts.
Try naming one modern OS that uses segments; the last one to do it was medium model Windows 3.11 and SCO Xenix 2.x, a full *decade* ago.
PS: If I wanted to use bank selection, I'd be writing software for the Commodore 64.
PPS: While we are at it: ring 1 and ring 2 were also stupid ideas; no modern OS uses anything other than ring 0 (kernel) and ring 3 (user). At least on the VAX architecture, you could use ring 2 to implement asynchronous system traps to call user functions from the kernel that ran as if they were in ring 3, only on a different stack. Too bad Intel's ring 1 & 2 aren't even useful for that.
PPPS: Try building a processor that's friendly to how people are actually going to use it, instead of pretending we live in some imaginary hardware designer universe where Spock has a beard, for a change.
-- Terry
no nyt posts! required registration sucks.
Hey regarding compilers.... Does anyone have any info about how .NET will go on Itamium, or even Java?
.Net and Java are all about JIT compiliation of some intermediate bytecode to native machine code as needed.
.Net assemblies at runtime will have a higher performance overhead on Itamium, if the JIT compiler wants to extract the best performance out of the chip?
Think about it,
Itanium is all about moving the complexity of moving out-of order execution and stuff onto the compiler at compile-time instead of doing it at runtime with silicon.
Doesn't this imply that JIT compilation of Java Bytecode or
Has anyone here seen/done any benchmarks for this?
That is why Sun is targeting the desktop market (the high end desktops, for engineering, graphical, etc. Of course Sun isnt going to compete with Walmart).
PENAROL: Seras eterno como el tiempo y floreceras en cada primavera.
http://science.slashdot.org/science/02/09/29/00352 13.shtml?tid=134
That Itanium may help to keep you warm.
PENAROL: Seras eterno como el tiempo y floreceras en cada primavera.
Reading that article I got one major laugh...
"Every big computing disaster has come from taking too many ideas and putting them in one place, and the Itanium is exactly that," said Gordon Bell a Microsoft researcher
Appearantly they don't research their own product, IMHO
... any one ?
Sun doesn't have to survive for Hotspot to do well on Itanium2. AFAIK HP is porting their Hotspot-base VM to IA64. Little birds tell me the numbers are very good. I hope to see them become public in the next 3-4 months.
Static optimizations work quite well on Itanium, thank you. Note that profile-based optimization provides a lot of the benefits of dynamic optimization.
You think Intel is in the compiler business? You are really sorely mistaken. They make chips. Everything else is done to further that goal.
Your little world view is made even more ridiculous by your complete ignorance.
Sounds good to me. Winter is coming, I'll just slap an Itanium in and turn off my space heater this winter.
Seriously though, if the chips take this much power, is this peak or average? If the average load is anywhere near this, anybody using this is going to see a rather nice jump in their power bills.
Every time I turn on my PC the lights dim - phorm
If you want multi-gigabyte arrays, or even just to efficiently pass arround pointers to any kind of record in a pool that exceeds 4GB, then the instruction set needs to handle more than 32-bits, on the majority of instructions.
Regarding that quote about Intel having "Street Smarts about 64-bit":
I'm a little curious about what's so different about fitting 64 bit capabilities in the current x86 architecture than putting 32 bit functionality in the 286. I did a fair amount of assembly programming in 16 & 32-bit modes, so I have first-hand knowledge of what they did to the instruction set to fit this in. I just don't really see why it wouldn't be utterly straight-forward.
This is OT, but it's annoying the heck out of me:
l d=0&commentsort=0&tid=118&mode=thread&pid=4355834# 4357297
Anybody know why as soon as my IE window opens on this article I can't select anything with the mouse? I keep getting a little hand. Works fine on any window until I point to this URL
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=41021&thresho
Since there's no hyperlink, it's bloody annoying to have to type in the top (IE6)
Huh? I could swear I put a '>' (greater-than sign), in my subject? Either I need sleep more than I thought, or it got filtered out.
My subject should have read "address computations for greater-than 4GB of memory".
BTW, I specifically used "memory", instead of "RAM", since virtual memory would look the same to an application as that much actual RAM, obviously.
omg, the man in your link... is that his anus???
OMG
The Intel compiler is nowadays made by the company formerly known as Kuck & Associates, which was bought by Intel and is now an Intel division. They really do try to be profitable in the compiler business too.
I wanted to point out that the VLIW-like nature of EPIC isn't to blame for its power problems. I hope the Itanium doesn't reflect too poorly on VLIW, because it does generally scale to wider superscalar architectures than dynamic scheduling.
As you increase the number of instruction pipelines, linearly, the rate of growth of the logic needed to detect dependencies between the instructions and fill the pipelines increases much faster (at least a square?). Soon, the chip is dominated not by units performing the actual computations, but by scheduling logic. Kicking this logic out of the hardware and into software (where more fancy and elaborate optimizations can be performed, but where you have less information about things like memory aliasing) can make the hardware smaller, cheaper, cooler, and faster, and also makes room for more pipelines and registers. This is what VLIW is all about.
In fact, the primary way in which EPIC differs from the traditional VLIW approach (mostly for the purpose of binary compatibility, between different generations of Itaniums, but also for dynamic branch prediction, etc.) is that the scheduling dependencies are explicitly inserted in the instruction stream, but the actual scheduling is still done in the hardware. So, in compromising the pure VLIW approach, Intel made the hardware more complicated.
So, the direction of VLIW is the only practical way to scale instruction-level parallelism. It has the potential to beat CISC & RISC at price/performance, power/performance, etc. (for applications with a significant degree of instruction-level parallelism). Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of programming complexity and potentially binary incompatibility between different chips in a family (not a big issue, for embedded applications). The only question about VLIW is whether there's enough instruction-level parallelism in the kind of applications the processor is needed to run.
I think Intel is generally headed in the right direction, with the Itanium, and hope they ultimately succeed.
(I have no vested interest in intel or VLIW, other than that I have optimized code for VLIW architecture, before, and am interested in seeing ever-faster processors developed.)
The 64-bit aspect of both the Itanium and Hammer processers is only really useful for applications that need to address more than 2 GB of RAM. For normal applications it has no advanatage. Read this artical: http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=112
It's the other features of these processors that's really what's important
You only have to look at it's (itanic) performance under gcc to see the answer to this question. I seem to remember performance figures 20% of that obtainable with intel's compiler.
Stick Men
Itanium is a step backwards for software. It make the tradeoff of giving you somewhat better performance for a few languages and benchmarks, with complex compilers, while being even harder and more problematic for anything that deviates from the canonical benchmarks. That locks new kinds of software even more into a straightjacket than it already has been.
If Intel sees dynamic compilation as the solution to the complexity of Itanium, they should do the same thing Transmeta does: define a simpler instruction set for compilers to target and make the dynamic compilation and optimization software effectively part of the chip.
Maybe if you program in FORTRAN 77. But maybe it's time to move beyond that. In more interesting languages and programs, aliasing and branch direction cannot be predicted statically.
And even in FORTRAN, it's predictable only because if people need to write any interesting algorithms, they express them in a roundabout way that pushes the inefficiencies to a higher leve: the aliasing is still there and it still costs you performance, it just doesn't correspond to aliasing at the memory level anymore.
Shouldn't that be the DEC Alpha? So quickly these things are forgotten .... I'm still waiting for the day they start talking about the Compaq VAX!
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Hint: He is not some random Microsoft employee.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
As ever. Go ahead and mod me down, I'll post more.
thank you, Captain Obvious!
- 8 additional general-purpose registers, all 64-bit (total 16)
- 16 non-stacked FPU registers, all 64-bit
- 8 additional registers for SSE (total 16), all 128-bit (?)
Of course, a recompile will be necessaryThe Itanium isn't Intel's first attempt at a much more powerful non-x86 architecture. In the late 1980s, Intel was pushing the i860--eventually succeeded by the i960--which really were amazing compared to the x86 line, but they flopped.
And who can forget Motorla's 88000 line, which was meant to be the follow-on the the 68K?
You're right, it is utterly straight-forward, and that's why AMD has done it. You can see this from AMD's documentation about the Hammer architecture at www.x86-64.org. Intel can't do the same because it has bet the farm on itanium and it needs to persuade the corporate world to buy millions of itanium machines to recoup its R&D spending. They may have backed the wrong horse because 10 years ago when they started the project it seemed like the best thing to do. They will try every marketing, slaes and PR trick in the book to noble AMD's architecture simply because the cannot afford for Hammer to succeed.
Stick Men
They put eight of those into a frame to make 32-way SMP's.
Minor nit: it's 4 8-way procs that make a 32-way SMP.
Itanium Manuals
Itanium 2 Manuals
I haven't read it myself but you might want to give a look at the Reference Manual for Software Development and Optimization which "describes microarchitectural details of the Intel Itanium 2 processor, including cache hierarchies, memory management, and instruction execution latencies. It is targeted for developers of compilers and performance software".
I know a little bit about the Itanium because I wrote a paper arguing that we could cut down on the cost of context switches thanks to the Itanium's large address space, large TLB and page-level protection keys. It might bring microkernel research back to life.
These comments aren't intended to be flamebait or written for the purpose of trolling.
Intel's processor designs could be hindering its success. For years Intel has been marketing chips with more transistors and higher clock rates. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you perceive it, this doesn't neccessarily mean better products for consumers. Yes, Megahurts sells, transistor counts get more attention, and people (average Joe and Jane consumer) swallow it up and think they've got the latest greatest high tech equipment. The problem is, Intel should have invested in making their current processor designs more efficent first, not faster first. Now that their processors (pentium4) are operating near 3 GHz, the power requirements are astronomical. IBM, on the otherhand, invested in the RISC architecture and later included input from Apple and Motorola to design the PowerPC chip. If one looks at features only while ignoring market share, the PowerPC chip seems like a better processor than the Intel.
PowerPC has more but shallower pipelines than the Intel, lower clockrates = lower heat generation, 128-bit AltiVec processing unit gets more work done for every cycle.
Looking at these features alone shows that it is more cost effective over the long term to go with PowerPC than Intel.
As an Apple computer owner for 17 years, I know that the TOTAL COST of ownership of a Macinotsh for my needs has been lower than owning a PC. Yes, the hardware costs more upfront, but I don't have a power-hungry blast furnace living beneath my desk that has the Micro$oft tax. Even putting together your own computer as I'm sure most of the Slashdot readership does, still will not offset the cost of electricity for running that homebrew PC. I am hoping that IBM will market the Power4-derived 64-bit GPuL PowerPC processor for the Linux crowd.
It's ironic how Apple has been trying to dispell the Megahurts myth all while trying to catch up to Intel in the clockrate game. Intel is the undisputed leader of Gigahurts and now after years of designing processors around marketing stategies has it realized that electricity requirements are a significant factor in computer purchases in corporate America. It's intersting to see how computing needs have changed from "raw processing power" to "how much work can get done for the lowest overall cost". I suspect the California Enron scandel plays a small factor in these considerations.
While I'm not trying to plug Apple computers, I always recommend people to purchase a particular system for their computing needs, and then consider the factors I've mentioned.
The author suggests the normal "what's bad for Intel is bad for the computer industry ..."
It could be bad for Intel, because they placed a very large bet on this chip. However, HP is likely to suffer more. Moreover, AMD is for the first time getting serious consideration from Dell as a possible 64 bit chip in its server line. Furthermore, it would be to Sun and IBM advantage because HP would not gain a significant advantage due to its input in the Italium design and hardware previews from Intel.
Yes it might be depressing to Silicon Valley, but that's not the entire industry.
My first desktop UNIX box at work was a DG/UX on 88K. Extremely slow (it was outdated by the time I got it). Basically used it for an XServer, and every once in a while used gcc on it just to check compiler warnings (because no one else used it, I could give it the latest gccc, 2.7.2 at the time, without disrupting anyone else).
From http://www.research.ibm.com/arl/projects/rivina.ht ml: "The processor contains 19 million transistors, and was built in IBM's 0.22 micron CMOS process using copper interconnect. The processor dissipates 112 Watts at 1.15 GHz."
This is the Rivina 1.15GHz 64-bit PowerPC Processor.
It will keep you warm at night.
You forget that we live in a capitalism. Without Google, NYT could simply get its hits from other search engines and news feeds (i.e. slashdot, yahoo, etc).
Other search engines would love Google to make stupid decisions to censor some of the better news content. A partnership with NYT would just give them one leg up on Google. Google can't afford that.
On another note, regarding the "moronic registration process", I'm sure NYT has had plenty of time to re-evaluate its registration process to determine if it is counter-productive. I'm sure the money they save on consulting and profiling studies because they can link their stories to users far outweighs the $.005/hit of advertising money lost due to the 5% of its potential readers that are turned away.
If Intel was fully into the compiler business, would they still not want others to have optimized compilers for their chips?
Is it not the chips they are first and foremost trying to sell?
The idea of having an original compiler is to verify that the chip you made functions correctly. THen you pass on the info to compiler people, and get back to business: making chips.
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
When you are speaking at a conference, you are a representative of a company that is counting on you to promote its business decision.
;P
Consequently, it is not in any way surprising to me that this moron lost his job.
And it is not surprising to me that your karma whore submission did not "make the grade"
Someone posted the link above. You will note that itanium blew away all competition, including the power4
More open? Are Apple, Sun, and IBM any more open than Intel? All 4 vendors have nodded their heads in some form or another to free software. Intel has without a doubt spent more on "openness" than Apple. Probably more than Sun, and possibly on par with IBM, although I am only guessing based on the amount of money wach company has to throw around. The truth is, all companies want to align themselves with the "open" campaigns as much as possible without upsetting their partners and undermining their own business.
Just because Intel is the runaway market leader in desktop pc cpus/chipsets doesn't make them opponents of "openness".
But you are correct in one thing, this is a great time to change if you should choose. Apple isn't really a workstation vendor, so not likely to receive much new business as a result of itanium. Sun is almost guaranteed to lose business since they can really only steal business from high-end Xeon users, which are not going to be homeless until long after Itanium is mature and the unmatched performance leader.
Good luck AMD. I know they'll try, but being the Intel lapdog is their life story.
IBM is essentially the only one who can capitalize since they have a rival architecture emerging at the same time.
LC, thanks a lot for the interesting pointer.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
How does elimination of both PA-RISC and Alpha help HP? I presume the premise is that both lines loose money. But, how is it better to go with an Intel architecture that is unproven over two quality architectures that have shown good strength over the years. Note that HP does not own Alpha... Digital long ago sold that to... Intel, and now simply license it back. Wonder why there have been no major advances of Alpha in the past five years?
if you're in need of 64-bit computing, then please go and buy one, they already exist and work quite well. I've no doubt that 64-bit processing would be great if it were cheap, but the desktop doesn't need it. (unless you are a workstation user, but you are in the minority then)
I said that there was no GREAT demand for 64-bit chips. In that some people use them and are fine with them. However, most people find that it just isn't needed. Even people who are crunching numbers find that it isn't always needed to do a job.
Please tell me that you are on the forefront of technology! With comments like that you imply that everyone would actually use all that power if they had it. Let's face facts, the only people who are using their new PCs to their fullest are the people who are playing the newest games.
Everyone else is using a small fraction of last years computers.
64-bit computing will be required someday, but not until games require it. For all 'normal' tasks, you don't need it.
Believe it or not, but 32-bit processors can handle 64-bit numbers. Strange but true! They can handle almost any size data types, it just gets slower to actually do math on them. And for pushing pixels around, 32-bits is a very good comprimise.
Because you have no point.
Today, the home/office user has little need for a 64-bit CPU, that can address 64-bits and process 64-bit data types in a single op. Sometime in the future, that maybe the case, but as of yet, the application has not been written that requires such capability. If you want it, go and buy it. However I suspect that you are like most people and have a PC, and don't require processes that can address more then 2GB of space.
Course you may also run large DBs or scientific calculations, I don't know. In that case you probably already have a 64-bit computer, right?
I would be currious if anyone knows when Microsoft plans to ship the first release candidate for an 64 bit multiprocessor operating system that takes full advantage of the Itanium's capabilties. Thank you.
Not true - the NYT came to Google to work out a deal so that google would spider the NYT's news articles (which would have been unavailable to google's web spiders because of the NYT's registration). This info comes from this column which is referenced by this /. article. It's a good read on how the NYT needs google more than the other way around.
Other search engines would love Google to make stupid decisions to censor some of the better news content. A partnership with NYT would just give them one leg up on Google. Google can't afford that.
Okay, time to drop the crack pipe. Nobody said *anything* about censorship. What *is* being discussed is the NYT's decision to allow google news readers to view NYT's article without having to register (a topic you completly screw up in the next paragraph).
On another note, regarding the "moronic registration process", I'm sure NYT has had plenty of time to re-evaluate its registration process to determine if it is counter-productive. I'm sure the money they save on consulting and profiling studies because they can link their stories to users far outweighs the $.005/hit of advertising money lost due to the 5% of its potential readers that are turned away.
I seriously doubt the *main* reason the NYT has registration is for profiling studies. They want email addresses to sell (IMO) - an email address from a NYT reader is worth more than one from, say, etoys.com (or wherever). They decided it's worth it to them to go without the email addr in order to get the page view from google (and more importantly, a possible daily reader and/or subscriber). Besides, with the referrer-google, you onl;y get to view the *one* article without registration - if you then go to another NYT article linked from within NYT, you have to register.
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
MIPS is being eaten from the high end by PowerPC, and from the low end by ARM.
They'll be completely squeezed out in a few years.
The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they
serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have
no legitimacy.
-- Albert Einstein
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