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Intel's Itanium 2: Succeed or Fail?
An anonymous reader writes "'Intel's most powerful processor ever has the ability to take on IBM, sink Sun, make or break HP, and crush or revive AMD,' says Fortune's David Kirkpatrick. But the 64-bit question is what happens to the heavyweight competition if Itanium 2 succeeds or fails?"
As Intel now loses its backwards compatibility, they also lose their biggest advantage. Sadly, the IA64 will probably lose out to less spectacular, but IA32 compatible designs.
Alpha tried to emulate the x86 earlier and failed. Sadly.
Itanium/2 is a 64 bit processor. So it needs 64 bit software, including the OS.
Umm, no. For example I am running 32-bit Solaris on a 64-bit UltraSPARC. And applications compiled 32-bit.
Whereas in the case of Windoze, the 32 bit stuff (and even some 16 bit stuff) is built right in to the API.
Yes, that's why it's called the Win32 API. Work is well under way on Win64, but in Microsoft's ideal world, almost no-one will write to the Win64 API - they'll target the CLR, which itself will be 64-bit native.
Then the millions of apps that people use, right now an excellent way to lock customers in, are going to turn into a lodestone around their necks.
Yes, just like when Apple moved from 68k to PPC? Nope, wasn't a problem.
I'm sure Micro$oft is pissed as hell, but Linux is going to take a huge upswing when Itaniums start flying off the shelves.
That doesn't necessarily follow either. After all, Win 3.11 didn't fully exploit the 80386 either, and it wasn't 'til the first NT that Microsoft did.
It's already happening, you just haven't noticed it yet.
Jon.
I think the author has it backwards. He says if the new chip fails then blah. However, the more coherent argument is that if blah happens, then Intel's new chip has failed.
But, the author doesn't seem to realize that there's more than just out and out success or failure on the spectrum. It's more likely that there will be incremental change. Intel sells X units to A, B, and C, AMD sells Y to D, E, and F, and IBM, SUN, and co. sell to whomever. And things kinda ballance out.
All this new technology that's supposed to change everything dramatically, changes things to the degree that it's touted to. My money is still on evolution rather than revolution.
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
Plus, less power consumption could mean thousands or tens of thousands depending how many servers you have. If you're google or some other huge site with thousands of systems, the power savings means lower operation overhead.
Well, the trend broke in 2001 when people started to notice that the machines needed for this generation of software was not the fastest but the slowest machines on the market. That most users did not need a top end machine and instead could buy the slowest processor out there. During 2002, the same came true for lap tops. Now everyone is swimming in so much wasted CPU power that it is going to finally crush those that can't adapt to radically lower needs compared to what Intel and their competitors are churning out. Ask someone who runs a computer room and they will tell you that they are quickly consolidating old servers that cost $250K three years ago to a server that costs $15K and only takes up a quarter of the room.
Intel is in real danger of not surviving because it does not understand where we will be in 5 years. 5 years ago when they were in the middle of this effort they did not see our need for speed slowing dramticly and are now producing a chip that has such a limited market that it will never be profitable with all the investment that was in put in.
When you look at how a company responds to the typical S curve of development, they may make the first curve but often that screws up their timing on the second curve and they just go off the cliff.
It is something of a question whether this change will open up opportunities for new software. I think it will. Think shared memory -- very large memory spaces being simultaneously updated and accessed by multiple independent processes and processors performing different tasks possibly for different users. The three drivers of technology are corporate databases, games, and pornography. Huge memory spaces with multiple processors attached have many possible breathtaking applications in each of these domains. Start coding.
I think the success of the Itanium not only rests on its technical merits but more importantly it rests with how much mindshare they can get for the product with the business people who, more often than not, end up making technical decision in a void.
I think that Intel is aware of this. Marketing can make the product. The best engineered solution does not always win out.
Sun are still scheduled to release the UltraSPARC-IV this year (at last report) which will be dual-core (same as Power4) and might again leapfrog IBM for a while.
Sun aren't doing that badly, all things considered, given the current state of the economy. We'll see how things pan out over the next few years, but it's too early to say Sun/SPARC is dying.
The main problem is that the theory sounds good, but the reality shows a LOT of problems. The Itanium is a VLIW processor, which is quite different from the more traditional RISC and CISC designs of other chips. The idea is rather similar to the difference between RISC and CISC (which, these days, are more or less the same thing), move more of the optimizations into the compiler to make the chip design more simple, thereby allowing more money to be spent on fatter pipes, bigger caches, etc. for the chip.
The problem though, is that it's often EXTREMELY difficult for compilers to effectively optimize software for VLIW chips. Since the Itanium has no out-of-order execution or branch prediction, these things have to be done entirely at compile time. The compiler needs to organize the software so that the chip is constantly being fed with data rather than having the chip dynamically rearrange some instructions if others are sitting waiting for data. It also needs to include it's own concept of branch prediction, suggesting which branch is more likely to occur. What's even worse (and which I rarely see mentioned) is that it has to optimize it's software for a particular chip design rather than an architecture, ie Itanium software needs to be recompiled for the Itanium2 in order to see many of the benefits of the new chip.
As far as manufacturing goes, that's comparatively easy for Intel at least. There they just have to put up with a huge die and extremely high power consumption. Not exactly a cheap chip to manufacturer, but manufacturing chips has always been Intel's specialty. Also, the high selling price of the Itanium means that Intel can afford quite a bit of leeway.
Anyway, long story short, the big problem with the Itanium/IA64 in general is that it's a design that is VERY difficult to optimize code for. It requires a very good compiler to begin with, but even then there are simpily some optimizations that just can't be done at compile time, and those situations will hurt the performance of the IA64 chips a lot. If Spec CPU2000 scores are anything to go by, the things from CINT (ie databases, compression, FPGA design, compilers, etc.) are much harder to optimize for IA64 than CFP (mostly scientific computing applications).
Don't be so quick to predict the demise of Itanium. I would question your analysis based on past history of Intel products.
1. Heat - has been an issue since the 8087 and lower power products or improvements in heat removal technology have continuously become available. Even in current Itanium/Itanium 2 (Itanium Processor Family - IPF) products, heat is an issue but not one that is preventing IPF products from shipping. Over time you will see a significant reduction in dissipation in Deerfield/Monticito (SP?) but, in any case, solutions to the heat issue are becoming available.
2. Cost - Intel products are only expensive while customers are willing to pay high prices for them. Any time Intel has had competitive pressures, they have been able to drop the price to meet the new price point OR introduce new products that allow them to maintain their margins.
3. Nobody seems to understand that there is an IA-32 processor core built into the chips (starting with McKinley (Itanium 2)). For backwards compatibility, it's really an operating system issue more than a hardware/software emulator issue. When the operating systems are properly implemented, IPF will be able to run 32-bit IA-32 applications concurrently with 64-bit IPF applications. When Linux supports this, I think you'll see interest in Hammer wane.
4. I would disagree with your comments on the people who want 64-bit already have them. I would not disagree that there are limited projects testing out different 64-bit architectures, but I would be very surprised at there being any large server farms out there with the latest incantations of Power or Alpha and the SPARC/MIPS are probably looking for an upgrade.
5. Itanium is ideally suited for Linux. I agree with your comments with regards to Windows - but when you are upgrading to a new Linux release don't you rebuild/retest the application to make sure it still runs? In our Linux systems we have been able to port directly from IA-32 to IPF without any changes to application software.
I believe that there is a lot of opportunity in the market for a "standard" 64-bit processor and this is what IPF is designed for. IPF may not be the best or the first but they do have the track record in taking over a market and maintaining it. Nobody has made a lot of money betting against Intel and nobody has ever gotten fired for choosing their products.
I don't see how a new processor from Intel, or anybody else for that matter, is going to cause "serious competition" for any vendor such as HP, IBM, or Sun. When choosing a solution, IT doesn't go for Sun because its run on a Sparc CPU. They don't choose IBM because it runs a PowerPC. I give up on why they choose HP. :)
The point is, the CPU is just 1 little part in a solution. Intel isn't going to do any damage to these vendors unless they supply the entire solution, which isn't their business! To think otherwise is pretty dumb and a bunch of PR bullshit attempting to inflate Intel's stock value.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin