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Intel Reveals Itanium 2 Glitch
NeoChichiri writes "News.com is running on an article about glitches in Intel's Itanium 2 chips. Even though it doesn't affect all chips, they have still stopped shipments of the new 450 Servers until the problem is resolved. Apparently it has to be 'a specific set of operations in a specific sequence with specific data.' Intel is saying that affects the 900MHz and 1 GHz Itanium 2 chips and that it will not affect the upcoming 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 6M chips." Until the next iteration of chip arrives though, Oliver Wendell Jones writes, "they recommend working around the problem by underclocking the processor to run at 800 MHz instead of its default 900 MHz or 1 GHz."
Underclocking is typically necessary if a part needs more voltage than is allowed for with the default configuration. This is why when you overclock, the converse is generally required; you can get better overclocks by increasing voltage.
Obviously, Intel are not going to encourage people to increase the voltage of their processors in order to run them at the default speeds, as this can run the risk of thermal damage to the chip with insufficient cooling, or overly high voltages. It may however still represent an option for system administrators who are keen to retain the performance of the chip.
Does anyone else find it ironic that when Intel makes one mistake in a processor, everyone jumps on them for making a bad product, but software companies can sell products with thousands of bugs in them and people accept this as normal? Sure, we complain about buggy software, but I don't think anyone here expects any software to be completely bug-free. Why are Intel and other chip manufacturers held to such a high standard? Or, more importantly, why are software companies not held to the same high standards?. If Intel and AMD can make incredibly complex processors that are (usually) completely bug-free, why can't any software company in the world make any product that even comes close to being free of defects?
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
who exactly didn't expect something like this? Intel has a history of this sort of thing
Of course when it happens to Intel, then EVERYBODY knows about it. My question is, how prevelant is this sort of thing throughout the cpu industry? Anyone know of other "mistakes" by the other major players? It's hard to imagine that only Intel makes these kinds of goofs, esp. with the complexity of todays chips. As an example, wouldn't Mot's failure to scale up the G4 PPC chips be considered an "error"? They just caught it early enough to not to ship any chips and say "oh, we're sorry, our G4's won't go as fast as we originally stated, wait another year and a half or so and we'll get it all sorted out". Didn't they also do a similar thing with the 68040?
The problem is a sequence of 1s and 0s. Avoid those two numbers, and you'll be fine.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Finally, The electrical engineers are to blame. I knew my code was correct!
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You really are a troll, tonight!
Please read "Sun suffers UltraSparc II cache crash headache [theregister.co.uk]"
This was a problem with the cache RAM and not the CPU itself. It was traced to a supplier (IBM), who was selling a defective product.
In terms of reliability, the Itanium II is no worse than the UltraSPARC series of chips.
There is no data to back this up. I know you don't have it, and I certainly don't have it. The only people who really have it (Intel and Sun) probably won't give it to us, so this ends here.
However, since so many people pay attention to the flaws in Intel chips, they are likely to have less bugs than other chips.
This is not true. Intel is pressured by a time-to-market more than other suppliers, especially with respect to the Pentium line. Sun has obviously decided to delay product launches to work out issues (e.g., UltraSPARC IIIi), because their customers expect reliability over other concerns. Hardware doesn't really follow the "all bugs are shallow" mantra of the Open Source movement, we mainly have to have faith in the manufacturer's simulation and test labs.
In any event, the performance of the Itanium II is at least 1 order of magnitude greater than the UltraSPARC III and (soon) IV.
Do you even know what "order of magnitude" means? You are claiming that, if the UltraSPARC III scores 975 on something that the Itanium II would score 9750??? For a given clock, it is true that the Itanium II is faster than the US III, but by a fraction--not a factor of ten!
Also, the US IV, by definition, will be almost twice as fast as the US III for throughput, because it is two US III chips in one.
You really don't know what the facts are.
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