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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?"
...friend!
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.
http://www.hp.com/products1/itanium/performance/ar chitecture/speccpu.html
-Kevin
The IBM 64-bit processor is reported to be much lower power than the Power 4 chip it is derived from, and the actual chip is rougly the size of the Intel Celeron. See article.
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)
You know, you can download the compiler for evaluation purposes to actually see if there is a speedup in your application. The linux version is even free for non-commercial use.
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.
In the future I envision every IT department having its own trash can sized nuclear reactor. No need for UPS.
I know this was a joke, but a lot of people won't understand how silly this comment is. A nuclear reactor can really be quite small... but all it will do for you is get hot.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that a nuclear reactor is really just a fancy steam generator. The nuclear pile gets hot (heat-- after neutrons-- is the primary by-product of a fission reaction) and that heat is used to boil water. Steam drives a generator which creates electricity from the kinetic energy of motion.
So a trashcan-sized nuclear reactor isn't such a fanciful idea. But the enormous closed-loop steam turbine generator attached to it may be somewhat unwieldy.
Now, if you want to talk super-high-efficiency fuel cells, you've got my attention.