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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.
Yeah, if intel's new chip is a hit then the company will profit more. In other news if intell gains market shares then AMD will not have those same market shares.....i should be an econmic analyist.
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.
What exactly *is* the problem Intel has with manufacturing/designing Itanic? I always liked the theory.
Cheers,
-b
It'll never be the success that intel and HP envision for it and here's why. First, it's too hot and too expensive. Secondly is doesn't have any applications. I don't mean Gnome and KDE, I mean the sort of applications that big corporations run. Thirdly it isn't backwards-compatible with any existing architectures. You can't just take your binaries over and run them, at least not at full speed. Applications will need to be ported and retested. This is not insignificant in time, effort and cost. Fourthly, most people who want 64-bit in the corporate world already have it in the form of SPARC, Power, PA RISC and Alpha. Why should they change to an unproven, immature "jam tomorrow" architecture given their working and reliable systems already in use? I'm afraid intel missed the boat by about 10 years. If they'd brought out a 64-bit RISC at the same time as SPARC, MIPS, Alpha and Power they might have stood a chance. It's a turkey, and apart from a few niches (e.g. number-crunching super computers) it's doomed to failure. I don't even need to mention how Athlon 64/Opteron will eat its lunch in the commodity sector of the market.
Stick Men
Wait..I have heard that before....
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
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.
I've worked on 64-bit conversion projects for applications on HP-Unix, and it tends not be as trivial as it should be. I'd compare it to converting a 16 bit Windows app to 32-bit Windows. Yes, both should be trivial, but there are enough gotchas! On a per line of code, the Windows conversion was probably more involved, but then that was because it wasn't written as well - eg. assuming an "int" is 16 bits long.
RB
Um, Windows already runs on 64-bit hardware. If programmers use the typedef'd types instead of hardcoding pointer sizes, then the port should involve little more than a recompile.
The transition to Win32 was painful enough that the newer APIs are all written so as to make the next transition seamless. There may yet be a valuable crystal waiting inside the lodestone.
The proper plural of "Itanium" is probably Itania. HTH.
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.
No. The change was made at the 386.
The 386 was 32bit.
ChiefArcher
Nope, even the lowly 386 was a 32bit processor. The 386 SX though had a 32bit core with a 16 bit data bus and a 24 bit memory bus.
Patriotism is the opium of the masses
It's already happening, you just haven't noticed it yet.
Jon.
You might remember the same situation when Win32s and then Win95 were released. It took a few months for most of the apps to be rereleased in a native 32 bit format. Luckily win16 was (and is) still supported. Such will be the case with 64 bit desktops.
There have been articles in the MSDN about porting existing code to 64 bit windows API for a while.
I've perused them and there's really no major learning curve. Most stuff will just recompile as is, except for a few pointer hyjinks and some more esoteric inlined ASM.
Thing is, the same problems can apply to Linux and other OS code. Sloppy code is sloppy code no matter the social viewpoints of its authors.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
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.
Aw heck, I've seen plenty of those same assumptions in OSS code as well. Assuming int is 16 bits, and the such.
Not everyone has the energy to type malloc(sizeof(int)*20)
Bad coding habits are endemic in the free, Free, and proprietary worlds.
Good code will 'just work', bad code will need fixing to work natively.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
NT Alpha is both a 32Bit version and has been EOL'd (Although it lasted longer than NT PPC).
Windows 64 is due out Real Soon now, and it's delay is likely at least half the reason the Athlon 64 has been pushed back.
Itanium 2 is going to have to make up for the pathetic performance of the first revision (Which seems to perform on par with a Via C3)
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
If I may quote the author:
Don't pay any attention to this guy - he gets paid by the paragraph.
-Ryan
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.
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)
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.
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.
With Linux and Java, the actual CPU used inside a box is close to irrelevant. This was the same fact that made the DEC Alpha irrelevant: every program that ran on Alpha ran fine on Intel, with the exception of OpenVMS and Digital Unix software, which were also the only markets where Alphas sold.
Today, the OS has also become a commodity item, and niche OSes such as OpenVMS and Digital Unix are dead or nearing death. A hot expensive CPU cannot capture a market when it has to compete on a level playing field with cheap CPUs that run the same software can can be easily clustered or SMP'd to get the same performance.
The only way to break into a saturated market is to cut prices... does Itanium do this? I don't think so.
They may sell a few for the gadget hunters. But the notion of a CPU competing with IBM is so funny it's almost hilarious.
My blog
Alpha didn't have support for x86 anymore than PPC has support for 68K. They just had a good emulation system in software. Technically, "emulation" might be an understatment; they would dynamically translate the instructions, doing the work once for each block of code so programs ran faster the longer they ran.
Personally, I think that it was bad marketing and the loss of support from Microsoft (probably as a result of poor sales) that were the problem, not technical issues.
But I have a hard time envisioning the scenario in which my porn collection would require 16 billion gigabytes, and I'd want to view it all at once.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
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.
Mr. Kirkpatrick's article draws significant business conclusions - Dell will prosper, Sun will fail- from his analysis of the relative positions of the players today. I believe that most of what he cites as fact is wrong:
but I'm not sure his conclusions are wrong.
More precisely, you can't draw his conclusions from either his "facts" or his arguments, but that doesn't invalidate the conclusions.
For one thing articles like this become self-fulling prophecies and their prevalence in management oriented publications like Fortune help explain how Sun can be both a strong company and very weak share.
He may well be right on the specific issue of Itanium's future. Technically it's a pretty good chip and the fact that it's late and under-powered won't be important in the long run -the PA-RISC, which became a significant success, was also late and under-powered.
So will the Itantic sink? In my opinion Mr. kirkpatrick's article missed most of the significant elements in today's market picture that will affect this.
For example, the right parallel could turn out to be Intel's original Pentium Pro. As Intel's first completely 32 bit chip it was, briefly, a world leader in performance but only on 32bit applications. Since most Microsoft software used the older 16bit instruction sets, its performance on the Pentium Pro was terrible. As a result AMD was able to seize significant market share with its K-586 and Intel was quickly forced to re-introduce 16bit compatiblity in the Pentium line.
Years later the Pentium Pro came back - as the xeon - and that could easily be Itanic's fate too, if management at companies like Sun and AMD get their act together and make it happen. (see my article for my comments on how this could be done).
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.
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.
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
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 still think that's true. Windows on Itanium is a terrible value proposition -- almost nothing will be native for years and years to come, and x86 execution mode is way way too slow to be cost effective. I think we'll see very little Windows on Itanium.
OTOH, Itanium is virtually ideal for vendors moving from proprietary chips/UNIXen to Linux. I was still fairly skeptical about Linux' chances back then, but I'm not anymore. Linux on Itanium is going to be a smash hit and will dominate the datacenter.
Windows on servers is ... iffy. I see the possibility that AMD's x86-64 will be a hit in that market, but you'd have thought Athlon would be interesting too and it was completely ignored. Then again it's Microsoft's only real chance in the large server market so you can count on them pushing it really hard. If they succeed then expect an Itanium with a much improved x86 execution mode; I don't think Intel will go the extended-x86 route. If AMD does not succeed then Windows is going to be pigeonholed as a small server.
Regarding other chips, only POWER looks set to survive/thrive, but only in traditional IBM environments. Sun is in the middle of a financial collapse; I would be surprised if we see more than one additional generation of SPARC technology from them. Fujitsu has a nice SPARC, years ahead of Sun, but SPARC stuff is such a bad value proposition these days that it and Sun are going to die fast.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Well, Mr. PhysicsGenius, you're obviously not a genius when it comes to CPU architecture, operating systems, or the Windows APIs. I hate to flame the pro-Linux crowd (mainly because they hold most of the /. mod points), but this sort of thing, both in Linux and BSD crowds, is what makes us all look stupid. Like when you see these Windows vs Linux comparisons. Advocacy is great! Ignorant advocacy, however, is detremental to the cause. I mean look at this crap. This guy's point is that Windows is bound to a 32bit architecture and will have great difficulty moving to 64bit. Yet there have already been 64bit versions of Windows, and there already ARE versions of Windows in various stages of development for IA-64 and AMD's x86-64, not to mention that there were ports to Alpha and other platforms. This is the purest ignorance. My point is this. If you love Linux, tell people you use Linux. If you love BSD, tell people you use BSD. If they ask why, say "because it is so stable" or something. But don't say "because the archtecture is tuned in such a way as to make the porting to 64bit platforms much easier than W1nd0ze. I bet you M1cro$l0th will go out of business with 64bit CPUs become the norm!!" It makes you sound like a complete tool. Especially when you say "Windoze" and "Micro$loth". May I refer you to the following Penny-Arcade cartoon:
- 07 -22&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002
The fact that a good compiler takes an inordinate amount of time to create for Itanium is bad for small businesses and free software developers. It's good for Intel, if they succeed, since it will change the game (no compatibility) and make them top dog. Hmmmm. Where have I seen this before? Oh, right, Microsoft (ie, embrace Java, extend to C#).
x86-64 will be very easy for compiler writers. My company's own compiler would take 6 weeks to port to x86-64, but an IA64 port would take person years.
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
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.
Itanium is NOT ideally suitable for Linux.
The compiler requirements for Itanium are simply too high. Unless the GCC team has gotten some SERIOUS assistance from Intel, I would not expect the Itanium version of gcc to be good enough.
The real problem with Itanium is that it requires a remarkably better compiler.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Heh. WRONG!
Well, maybe not wrong on the processor side. From the vendor side (i.e. the Dells, IBMs, Compaqs, Toshibas of the world), there's just no margin to be made. Services are the only places these companies make money on the desktop, and even that's a tough sell.
Now if Intel can sell decent volume at a decent profit, they'll be fine. However, if the desktop manufacturers can't make a profit on the desktop, then the desktop computer will become a commodity, and CPU prices/profits will fall as a result.
So Intel has to keep both oars in the water. Besides, this processor is FAR bigger than just Intel. Look at the companies who collaborated on it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban