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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)
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
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.
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.
The difference between Windows 95 and 98 may be small, but 3.1 to 95 was almost as big as their version numbers suggest.
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/
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)
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
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!
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
They should expect help from Intel because open source GCC users aren't tied to Intel in any meaningful way. Offering better GCC performance effectively ups the performance of Intel processors for open source software. Especially since open source software is being used more and more for processor benchmarks this is useful for Intel. Sales of ICC are worth almost nothing to Intel.
Just as a quick point Compaq offered Gem for free to Linus about 5 years ago. They wouldn't agree to licensing terms so Gem didn't become system compiler but Compaq's willingness to give away a crown jewel to woo the Linux crowd proves I'm not entirely out of line.
Usually because of VM mapping software is limited to 2GB. With Windows you can up that to 3GB by buying Enterprise Edition. Mind you there are already "high memory" style hacks (just like the good old DOS days with EMM, etc) to access extra memory in servers.
there are fewer and fewer jobs
.com world is continuing to cause pain to the entire technology sector. In such cases, the people in the middle always presume the entire planet is going through the same thing. A constant stream of steelworkers, farmers, textile workers, etc, all telling us that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
There are always certain industries going through upheavals. Right now the
When people don't have jobs, or fear losing their job, they stop spending money. When they stop spending money, companies can't sell goods. It's one of those trickle down things.
No, it's one of those "self fulfilling prophecy" things. When people run around with their heads cut off because pets.com can't sell $3 of kitty litter with $20 shipping, then indeed consumer spending can collapse. But you know what? It hasn't happened. People have gotten wary of the media's constant "next big depression" bullshit (and the pessimists who run around proclaiming it whenever they can), and consumer spending has remained tremendously high. Most people have come to realize that, as mentioned, life goes on. The stock market, a completely ridiculous pyramid scheme that has little bearing on reality, crashed? Big deal. Most of us aren't retiring this year, and it always comes back: Nothing to panic about.
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?
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.
"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.
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?
Well, the steam generators don't have to be that big, actually. For example, there are steam locomotives in use which are about as powerful as similarly sized diesel locomotives, only their fuel consumption is a lot worse.
Anyway, you don't necessarily need steam either. There are those nuclear batteries used on spacecraft and shit like that. Terribly inefficient, but you get electricity from a nuclear reaction with no moving parts at all. And don't forget gas turbines, that many of the more modern nuclear powerstation designs are using. They can be a lot smaller than comparable steam generator systems. For example the Pebble bed modular reactor.