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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?"
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...
"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?
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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."
http://www.hp.com/products1/itanium/performance/ar chitecture/speccpu.html
-Kevin
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.
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'
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
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)
...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.
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.
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)
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.
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!
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...
Um, its a river in Oregon (you know, that state Intel is based in?) All Intel processors are codenamed after rivers. Now, your post is basically just making fun of a place name, which is actually quite offensive to the locals. Its like, "Oh, Ouagadougou, what a stupid name for a city, who thought up THAT?"
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.)
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.
While you may think that GCC should not expect anything from Intel, Intel disagrees; Intel has provided documentation as well as money for Red Hat (and Cygnus before them) to get free software to run decently on their hardware. AMD has done the same, it is simply good business.
GCC is a portable compiler; ia64 is a radically new architecture that needs special treatment from compilers. It will take time to get things working well, and problems with compilers may be the factor that makes AMD win in the long run over Intel. If the ia64 is theoretically faster, but compilers generate better code for the less radical AMD 64-bit processor, AMD wins the performance battle. If you have to buy a compiler from Intel to get the same performance you get with AMD with the free compiler, same deal. For that reason, Intel will have a strong financial motivation to help GCC do better, even if this cuts into their compiler business.
>just makes you wonder if we'll still be using x86 compatible chips in the year 3029..
Yup, and IPv4, and people will still not buy a PC without a 1.44MB floppy drive, despite the fact that the last floppy disc was finaly destroyed in 2589...
Advanced users are users too!
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?
"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.
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.
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/
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.
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.