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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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