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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?"
IBM rules high-end computing, the consumer sees nothing. They probably still buy Intel because they like the jingle.
I doubt the Dell server market makes much of a difference whether it is AMD or Itanium.
I do agree with the fact that we would see a rebirth of AMD, though I don't think it's really dead.
Sun might find some breathing room for SPARC, maybe a few saving graces for poor ole Sun who has been struggling financially.
The article's last mention is that HP ends its exclusive commitment to Itanium and uses some AMD chips. This sounds like a stretch, one gamble on a processor to stain a large business relationship?
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Free your mind.
Am I alone in feeling the Really Big Question is how much the Opteron costs? They've pretty much said the Athlon64 has to wait another quarter. So then, the "desktop" just has to wait, and its success really depends on the buzz the industry gives from the introduction of the Opteron.
But I just don't see much buzz coming from the Opteron, unless they capture the hearts and imaginations of that "Workstation" market they throw right in there with the "Server" market in their roadmaps. And quite simply, to do that, they still need to keep costs really low. Slightly more expensive than the Pentium 4, but WAY below the 2nd mortgage Itanium II.
Personally, the second i find out how much the Opteron ships for, I'll make a decision on buying stock in AMD for a long term investment. If they drop the ball on this one, their new "away from chip making" strategy doesn't inspire much confidence in this investor.
this reminds me of what Apple had to do (and get developers to do) when they were moving from the 680x0 chips to the PowerPC chips - it wasn't until Apple jumped to OS X that they had a truly 100% PPC Native OS. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft handels this transition.
Ignorance is the Agent of Fear; Fear Is the Agent of Violence - >1
Is it possible to have a motherboard with two processors, a P4 and an Itanium? The core OS could run on the Itanium and non-Itanium stuff could get executed on the P4 processor(s).
I'm sure this is a stupid idea that many other posters will point out the weaknesses of, but I'm wondering why it couldn't be done.
The article doesn't really touch on why intel is so buddy-buddy with Linux (they've helped refine GCC and other important issues).
linux will always be best on intel CPUs, because they are the most available. linux is taking over proprietary UNIX boxes by Sun, HP, and SGI.
guess what, all those UNIX boxes used to have high-performance CPUs attached to them (MIPS, PA-RISC, etc). Now they are all going the way of the dino...thanks to Linux.
the more popular Linux is in the server room, the more likely Intel will be riding its coattails. And yes I know that Linux exists for other archs, but Linux/SPARC, Linux/PPC etc are always a step behind the Intel version.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Is it just me, or has there been really no mention of the Itanium on a "consumer" desktop? It sort of mirrors the "Pentium Pro" situation of numerous years back...it was pitched as a server-and-datacenter processor, but it was years before it became the Pentium II. On the other hand, AMD's Opteron/Athlon 64 has been touted as a consumer piece from the very start. The consumer and "business" processors have been developed side-by-side, and their release dates are rather close. Is AMD the smarter or the dunce here? Time will tell. I, for one, am putting off any personal computer upgrades until 6 months or so after the A64 comes out.
IA64 itself is not at all backwards compatible with IA32. The first Itanium processor had some sort of hardware-assisted IA32 emulation, but saying that it was really slow is an understatement. The 800MHz Itanium was generally about comperable to a Pentium 100 when it came to IA32 software.
After it was discovered just how terribly the Itanium was going to run IA32 software, Intel stopped talking about this capability altogether. From the looks of things, they've dropped the hardware emulation altogether from the Itanium2, though it may still exist as a (mostly?) undocumented feature.
There's another little-considered thing about IA-64: It's the most proprietary major CPU on the market. AFAIK, every one of the major CPUs has some form of cross-licensing or functional cloning in place, except IA-64. (Actually, I don't know about HPPA, but I'm sure there's some cross-licensing of technology through HP's IP agreements.)
It's not because of market positioning, either. It's not something that will come on as soon as IA-64 succeeds.
It's because Intel and HP set up a company specifically to hold the IP of IA-64. Intel and HP don't hold any IA-64 IP themselves, they get it from this company. That way, the IA-64 IP is not covered by any agreements of Intel or HP, either.
This is no guarantee that 100% private IP is evil. Nor is it a guarantee that it won't be licensed in the future. Nor is it a guarantee that Intel and HP won't come at each others' throats with a price war. But it's a degree of lock-in that should be a factor in any decision.
This issue isn't mentioned in either article.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
There is a movement towards bytecode in some form. Java, C#, Parrot (Perl, Python, Ruby). That improves portability. So - if cost of porting and retesting combined with Itanium 2 hardware is less than sticking with your current architecture, you will see Itanium 2 succeed to some degree.
Anyhow, Intel has the advantage that it stands on two feet in the processor market - desktop computing and server computing. If Itanium 2 fails, I doubt it will break their back.
Stop the brainwash
Actually, I don't mind the idea of breaking X86 compatibility - I just object to breaking it for IA-64. IA-64 was conceived in a time when it was felt that Out Of Order (OOO) execution was going to be too tough a nut to crack.
In less time than Intel and HP took to go off and crack the VLIW/EPIC problems, other design teams learned to handle OOO, and do a very good job of it. They appear to have succeeded, and have a leading-edge part - but at what cost. AFAIK, the IA-64 is the most expensive CPU ever made.
The latest-out CPU usually does seem to hold the performance crown. But IA-64 doesn't seem to hold it that solidly, and there's question about whether the latest Alpha iterations have been allowed to fully appear - for fear of embarassment.
IA-64 looks almost like a government project gone wild. It has produced results, but IMHO horribly inefficiently. Pushing a more reasonable (not necessarily more conventional) architecture might well have yielded better results.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
One of those sheep, sadly enough, is Shawn Robison, the CTO of HP. Mike Capellas brought him onboard at Compaq, whereupon he shoved aside all of the technical gurus from Digital, and then brought him over to HP and left him to continue to kiss Bill Gates' ass (and Steve Ballmer's) after Curly was lured away to eviscerate Worldcom. Robison is well-known as a Wintel Weenie - he thinks that Windows will ultimately rule the world and he wants it that way. He absolutely hates Unix in any form, be it Tru64 UNIX or HP-UX. The problem is, his high-end customers, the few that he has left, know better and continue to insist on high-end Unix systems. It doesn't take much analysis to figure out who some of the early non-commercial customers are for Marvel and the other associated products.
It is interesting that HP's Longview, Colorado labs developed Itanium2, and did so untainted by association with the Alpha Development Team, which was sold/indentured to Intel. It remains to be seen if Intel will be smart enough to merge all of the technology that they've stolen, er "bought", over the last few years, and be able to field a saleable product.
As for the heat dissipation, etc., well, that's been a laughable issue for many, many years, and won't change. It should be fairly obvious that the more transistors you cram into a single die, the more heat you're likely to need to dissipate. Intel laughed at Digital's initial Alpha chips because they did indeed dissipate more heat than the '486 chips shipping at the time. By the time Intel had fabricated a few Pentiums (at 60 and 66 MHz, for the software developers to have a realistic platform to use to port their software), Digital had built another generation of EV4's, at a higher speed and about the same heat, by lowering the voltage. Intel finally looked over their shoulder at Digital, and realized that they (I) simply couldn't continue to build complex microprocessors with a 5V Vcc, and started reducing the voltage. Of course, when Intel did all that, it became _acceptable_ to have a large heatsink and fan in one's computer. The fact is that Intel copied a great deal of what Digital pioneered and then made it look like they'd invented it.
As far as I'm concerned, Intel's plagarism and unethical business practices rank in the same cesspool as Microsoft's. Unfortunately, as long as there are assholes like Robison in positions of authority (yeah, Cartman comes to mind), the rest of the industry will suffer for it.
I run Linux on an SMP Athlon (2xMP1800+) for those reasons, and many others.
That's exactly how AMD hopes to make it big with its Hammer line. An x86 compatible 64 bit machine.
;-) (which probably need such enormous computing power for survival) on them yet.
But i guess it's a good thing for computing that Intel decided to shift away from that x86 instruction set. The x86 instruction set was really bad design and not at all suited for all the pipelining that came rushing in after it. I am pretty sure the guys at Intel had to break their heads over pipelining with the x86 instruction set. The one fundamental principle of pipelining is a clean instruction set. Even all those textbook examples use instructions of as fixed a size as possible. And the x86 instruction set has tiny 1-byte instruction to 17 - byte monsters. Makes for real bad pipelining.
And so because a lot of people sell Intel chips and because a lot of the world is going to run on them, it is better they are really neat and fast instead of trying to prop up a century-old architecture.
Best of luck to the guys at AMD, though. a 64 bit x86 compatible chip. If they really manage it quick enough, they might lap up a significant market share, especially because there's really little software for the IA64 line as yet. At least M$ hasnt put in its Win series of hi-performance OSs
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There are chips out that come close. The new C3 processors (VIA) run at 1 gigahertz. They also use 15 volts of power and dissipate under 10 watts of heat. And then there's VIAs Eden, which is an embedded processor platform (yes, it will run linux) that runs up to 1 gigahertz, IIRC. And according to them, it uses up to 1.2 volts and dissipates up to 6 watts of heat. And that's less than 1/10th.
And it's not only about power consumption. A lot of people have gotten sick of machines that sound like lawnmowers, and are going to the quiet side. Quiet is the new Overclock. You now can have a 2 gigahertz machine that only puts out 20 decibels of noise at 1 foot.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
> The companies that need and use 64-bit applications will not want those
> applications running on commodity hardware. They'll want a well supported
> platform and one that works time and again.
That's certainly the conventional wisdom, but I'm not so sure if it applies in the near-to-long-term future. There's a great article in the Feb 03 issue of Red Herring that tangentially applies... they talk about the trend of companies to just buy farms of cheaper, redundant servers built from commodity hardware, instead of the behemoth workhorses of old... they mention Google, which is typically a bellwether for other large online operations.
From a practical standpoint, why buy (and upkeep) a service contract with Sun or IBM when you can get 40 P4's or Athlons running FreeBSD for similar cost and replace them with parts from CompUSA at your leisure as they fail ?
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BTW does IA64 really have no branch prediction? Surely that is data-dependent and better done dynamically!
I buy Intel because their chips and chipsets are rock solid stable, at least compared to other PC chips and chipsets. And for ultimate stability you can even go with an Intel motherboard. Besides stability they are also compatible with a wide range of hardware. You don't have to worry about filling up every DIMM and PCI slot, it will just work.
Maybe if the people who buy Intel today are left behind by the Itanium, they will drive a market for stable and reliable chipsets and motherboards for AMD processors.
I'm running i386 code on the Altix system I'm testing on. I don't really care how fast the code runs, I just want it to run. So the Itanium 2 still runs i386 code.
I buy Intel because their chips and chipsets are rock solid stable
That's funny. I recall Intel being in the recalled motherboard of the month club recently. Between all of the problems that they were having with RDRAM and then with their SDRAM bridge chips things were getting really ugly.
Frankly, AMD's use of the Alpha's bus architecture for their dual-processor boxes makes them much more attractive. Dedicated memory bandwidth for each CPU is a nice thing. (It would be nice to see them scale up to 4 and 8 way boxes however.)
We've got a Beowulf cluster of dual-AMD boxes and the thing just cranks out the calculations.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
since the HP-Compaq merger, service and support has gone straight to hell.
You've noticed that too? I thought it was just the former Compaq customers who were getting screwed.
At my last employer we had 50+ Compaq Proliant servers on Gold service. Service and support started going noticably downhill from just before the merger announcement. The rate of decline did nothing but increase after the merger closed. It was so bad just before I left that they opted not to renew any support contracts and began searching for a 3rd party support provider.
Carly and Capellas have managed to destroy 4 good companies (HP, Compaq, DEC, and Tandem)
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