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?"

Comments

amazing article

[Shymon]

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.

No one will ever need more than 64bit.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

Wait..I have heard that before....

Re:It's all about the OS

[redbaron7]

Windows NT has been available on the Alpha for at least 6 years - I've had the installation CDs for at least that long!

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

Re:Backwards compatibility

[Gortbusters.org]

True. Believe it or not my mother still has my old 486 case I gave her. She has swapped the motherboard for a Pentium2, the graphics card, added memory and tweaked the thing beyond everyone's wildest dreams! It's her hobby.

Her favorite apps: microsoft works, netscape 4.7, and some kodak digital photo software.

The point: Not everyone has the latest and greatest of computers, the vast majority of the public is using our throw away computers or the cheap stuff from circuit city. They will still need to be supported.

Re:It's all about the OS

[JKR]

Wrong, wrong wrong! You don't know what you're talking about. MS have been transitioning the API to being 64 bit clean for at least a year, probably two; They already supplied a 64 bit SDK/DDK with the MSDN so developers can check their applications. FFS, Nvidia are SHIPPING 64 bit video drivers for their cards for WinXP-64.

It's already happening, you just haven't noticed it yet.

Jon.

Dare I say it

[Anonymous Coward]

It feels like it is time for chips that run at 2ghz, but at 1/10th the power and produce 1/4 of the heat. With grid computing growing steadily, trying to cool 5 or 10K servers at the current heat and power level is crazy. Heck trying to cool 10 rack mount server sufficiently is hard enough without stuffing 34 of them into a rack. Look at all the cases out there for extreme cooling these days. I don't about anyone else, but if each 1U rackmount only needed 2 fans total instead of 7, it would save a lot of money.

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.

Intel is crushing itself against Moore's Law

[jj_johny]

OK, its great that Intel and other can make a 64 bit processor. Its great that they are making faster and faster 32 bit processors. But the big question is where is the market? And I don't mean that there is nothing that needs the speed. There is plenty but compared the previous market where any new processor would be scooped up and would have a 10% market share. Then it got that computers were so cheap that Intel and everyone else thought that since everyone was buying more high end systems that the trend would go on forever.

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.

Mindshare over technical merit

[snapperOrgans]

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.

Re:Fail - Nobody ever got fired buying Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Cool CPUs - and more than just one use

[mbourgon]

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.