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Intel Plans A Common Socket For Xeon, Itanium
stonedonkey writes "According to EE Times, Intel is planning a common system platform for the Xeon and Itanium by 2007, "creating a unified 64-bit motherboard with a new, one-size-fits-all socket." Intel's Jason Waxman says , "It has been something that customers have been asking us for for a while now...the reseller [currently] has to have an inventory of both boxes on hand." Feeling the heat from the competition, cutting losses, or just friendly customer service?"
The Inquirer reported on something just like this nearly a year ago. Of course this is actually confirmed with a date, but the Inq still has a bit more information.
You still can't stick an AMD in there.
While it's nice to know that they're planning on doing something that will take away a few more headaches, whose to say that this will ever get out the door and to the consumers?
I imagine Intel wants a polite way to keep the Itanium on the books for very special applications and to save face. Zeon will, at least in the near future, be the processor of choice and a common socket will keep it from eclipsing the Itanic.
There might even be a chance that the market will change enough to want the Itanic, but not if they have to maintain specialized hardware for a currently very niche market.
LS
d) all of the above.
At the rate Intel is keeping pace, by the time they get a 64-bit processor out with a unified socket, we'll be running Athlon 128's and dual dual core PowerMac G6's (also 128-bit)...sigh...
:D
Get with the pace, Intel, and get a consumer 64-bit processor out! That way we get your P4's for cheap
Glad to see that Intel is finally waking up and smelling the coffee.
Eg: how does a system bootstrap itself from power on to the point where the OS is loaded? That's the job of the code in the BIOS (or OpenBoot, or equivalent). Do you believe that x86-32 BIOS code is going to work to get an Itanium CPU loading the OS? The only way you'll get a generic BIOS to work is if there's an opcode that will allow a jump to a given address in one CPU, whilst just incrementing the instruction pointer on the other.
Look at Athlon. The Athlon bus was designed so that you could, in theory, plug an Alpha into an Athlon board. How many boards were made available to do this? Zip (that I know of, anyway.)
Intel are desperate to increase sales of Itanic (typo deliberate ;) -- they're hoping that by doing this, the economies of scale will make Itanic more appealing. Sorry, Intel; I'd say that this is the beginning of the end. Your fortunes were built on backwards compatibility, and it looks like that's now the millstone around your neck, dragging Itanium down.
First, the lead-in on Slashdot is silly. Intel has been planning this for a while. Yes, it is good customer service. They're not "cutting their losses" and this move makes sense even if AMD were to fold up tomorrow.
It's just simply too expensive to develop two different motherboard sets when you could leverage the increasingly similar characteristics of high-end Xeon motherboards and Itanium motherboards.
Also silly is the end of the article suggesting that Itanium will take over the world any time in the reasonably distant future. This is a strawman will no doubt ignite a frenzy of Itanium hating from various people (yes, we've all heard it before, Itanium is dead, Linus hates it, etc.). Besides, it doesn't reflect Intel's current clearly stated strategy, which indicates that we'll have both architectures for a very long time.
I'd say, gearing down to a commodotized market.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
With Opterons coming in much less expensive than the Itaniums, moving to a common socket with the Xeons isn't going to help much.
On the other hand, with Opterons offering far better scalability and performance than Xeons, moving to a common socket with Itaniums isn't going to help out much.
Even on 2-way machines, Opterons show much better scalability than Xeons. As the number of CPUs increase, the Opteron architecture (when coupled with a supporting OS) allows it to shine more and more. With 8-way Opterons coming out fairly soon, Intel needs to come up with something fast - they're losing one of their most lucrative markets to AMD.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Intel would only do this if saving money was more important to them than giving people a credible reason to buy Itaniums instead of Xeons... and I do believe that's the situation at this point in time. Not a good sign for the future of Itanium.
I don't think that AMD will ever beat out Intel completely, but if they keep making the right moves, they will be able to force Intel to radically change how it does business.
Intel has traditionally enjoyed very, very healthy profit margins. AMD, on the other hand, has traditionally lost money - it's only been in the last quarter or two that they've even posted a profit. To bring a company from the times of the K6 and K6-2 to having an incredible offering like the Opteron, while having to be so cautious with money, shows that AMD can be resourceful, and compete even when it's an uphill battle.
Intel, on the other hand, has enough infrastructure, capital, partners, investment, and diversification that it will never be beat out entirely. However, as AMD starts to make more and more profits (by eating into Intel's most lucrative market!), they'll (theoretically) be able to step up the competition and give Intel an even stronger opponent. If they do that, Intel will have to start being much more frugal and resourceful.
Up until a few years ago, the AMD-Intel battle was pretty one-sided. Now, things are going to be a lot more fun to watch.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Dude, Intel's got it's own OpenFirmware like doohickey already for the Itanium, it's called EFI.
Anyway, it's really simple. The processors will assert different "core-type" lines, which will control which ROM is memory-mapped to the default EIP pointer at boot time. I mean, Intel processors already signal their allowed clocking speeds by pins right now. Hell, they're probably different in x86-32 and Itanium, so they could both "be active" all the time, jumping to the appropriate memory-mapped physical address (both of which would be mapped at power-on to their own ROMs) and there'd be no need for an option line.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Actually, the real question is how much longer Microsoft will support the Itanium. Remember when NT supported MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and x86? Actually, Microsoft only supports the Itanium in a very limited way. The OS, and a few server side apps, run native. But that's it. The desktop apps all run in emulation, as far as I can find out.
In general businesses try to "segment" their market, and when you vertically own the market, it is in your best interest to "make" everything, including different socket types
The problem has been that in the high-dollar area (Xeons), they've been sticking the consumer with slower busses than the desktop line. Until recently, when there was no other option in the price range, people just sucked it up and dealt with it. Now that there is good competition, that's going to have to change. This is probably a way for them to get some fast busses into their high-dollar (Xeon and Itanium) lines without it looking like they could have done it all along.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
AMD has lots of processors that do both 32-bit and 64-bit. Problem is the number of different sockets out there. This means you need to change your motherboard everytime you switch from one socket to another - big expense and something that makes u think a lot about which socket u want.
Intel says...use our 64-bit procs and you won't need to change the socket. This is a marketing thing. I don't think there will be much of a performance difference if the socket is changed. But it makes things more convenient for the customer.
Now, if AMD had done this...they would have grabbed market share. It might still not be too late to unify the sockets...but then it looks like it will be more difficult for AMD given the differences in the processors available across their entire range.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Not that slaping together server hardware is that dificult (and I really don't know much about hardware design) but, wouldn't you want boards that are optimized for use with either Xeon OR Itanium? Wouldn't creating compatability on this hardware reduce its performance? Or is this a non-issue?
"Initial success, or total failure!"
remin8.com
And as a post pointed out next to mine, newer mainboards typically have plenty of other nice features.
If you're complaining about how much it costs to upgrade each time -- then don't. Especially these days, you really don't need the fastest and latest. I'm still using a 64MiB Radeon 8500 and I still don't see any compelling need to upgrade. (Although in my favor, I really don't care for Doom 3.)
no, even for that, IBM Power5 CPU got better SpecFP score.
And when you compare with all the factors, it doesn't mind if they're faster than opteron if they cost 4x the price and takes 2x the power (and generate 2x the heat).
#include "coucou.h"
Seriously - why would you want 128 bit addressing. Modern CPUs are already "128 bits" or more wide in many of the ways that count, such as SIMD registers and instructions. I'm not sure how many applications are working with data that would benefit from 128 bit wide integers and floats, but I'm going to make a guess at "not many."
The move to 64 bit addressing is being done mostly because we've run out of room on the 32 bit address space. I'm not dumb enough to say that we'll never run out of the 64 bit address space, but I think it's safe to say it'll take a fair darn while before we do. Remember that AMD's 64 bit CPUs only use 40 bit (or is it 48 bit?) physical addressing to provide support for terabytes of memory, so they've got quite a bit of headroom within the 64 bit address space.
Aren't those elements with one letter missing?
Xenon, Titanium... hmmm...
What next, the Intel Trontium? the Intel Kryton?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm sorry but saying Itanium is crap is just flamebait unless you present a decent argument. The Itanium isn't as crap as most people make out, sure it has it's flaws but that's mainly because it was overdesigned for the future. The later generations of Itanium have much improved.
If you want to support innovation remember it was a fairly gutsy thing to do dropping the legacy x86 hardware support from it. The cost performance-wise of maintaining support has impacted on every processor intel's built since early Pentiums.
P4 and Xeons are pretty much same stuff, right... Both are x86 compatible, both (in theory, not yet) run X86-64 extensions. Itanium is something very different, it runs IA64 instuctions which are very incompatible with x86-64.
For me this looks like the last attempt to screw things up for AMD and x86-64 architecture in high-end workstations / servers.
Let's assume that you are a pretty big boss in a normal company. Your company has decided to upgrade their High-End computers. You have basically two options:
Either you recommend 100% Intel Hardware that runs current 32-bit stuff fine and is ready to be upgraded or is even compatible with IA-64 stuff. x86-64 compliance is hardly mentioned in specs. If there even is such compatibility. 64-bit thing is important for future. Not probably yet, but in future. (Xeon/Itanium mixed platform)
or
"50% Intel compatible" AMD platform which runs current 32-bit stuff very well, but the x86-64 instruction set is non-compatible with Intels High-End IA-64 infrastructure. So only partial Intel compatibility, sounds bad... Thats like 50% Intel incompatible... (A64 / Opteron platform)
You are really going to have hard time convincing yourself and your even bigger bosses, that Non-Intel compatibility is good for your business. Mainly because Intel compatibility has been THE most important thing for last 15 years or so...
Then Intel just starts it's advertising/lobbying campaings and hopes that this is enough to turn the tide for them...
ps. if there are typos just blame the damn internet-cafe's german kezboard... somebody has swapped mz Z and Y.
Long ago, upgrading cpu with cpu upgrade kit from 386 to 486 and 486 to pentiums was quite a possible deal to boost an old machine up.
In 1997 I bought an Intel(!) mobo with Slot1/celeron buggy cpu. As was advertised these days, I hoped I will buy much better cpu some 2-3 years later instead of whole machine, because in past 15 years, as a developer I was buing a new machine for personal desktop every 2 years.
Unfortunately, no such upgrade was actually available, all "new" Intel processors were either completely different slot/socket or incompatible timig (mobo too slow). Again, in 3 years, I was forced to buy a new machine instead with some new stupid socket, which becomes obsolete today.
So, I do not believe Intel upgrade cpu/compatible cpu propaganda anymore. My new machine is AMD Opteron.
There you are, staring at me again.
The processors will assert different "core-type" lines, which will control which ROM is memory-mapped to the default EIP pointer at boot time.
Close. It would not make sense to have two or more ROM chips on the motherboard to support different architectures. So, what you do is take 1-3 lines from the processor or jumpers and connect them to the high order address lines on a larger capcity rom CHIP. 1 Line gives you two different architectures. 3 lines gives you 8 archs if you could ever get that many chip families in the same socket. Or take a chip about twice the capacity and use 4 select lines. Banks 0-8 of 16 would boot different processors and load microcode, chip specific code, and a java bytecode interpreter (not much in the BIOS needs to be very fast, except maybe the memory test). Then the whole top half of the ROM would be used for bytecode, with the 4 select lines being re-multiplexed as regular address lines once the firmware got to a certain point. Even better, a trivial change to the CPU cores could make them each start at different addresses in a jump table at the top of the ROM. Reserve the top 256 bytes as 16 different 16 byte locations. That should be more than enough for a jump instruction in any architecture, even with 64 bit opcodes with separate 64 bit addresses.
It really would be nice to have an industry standard processor bus which you could plug an intel, AMD, SPARC, or PowerPC chip into. It could be an interface with some optional pins. You could have a 128bit memory bus but only use half of it on some processors or motherboards. And you could have variable numbers of PCI-Express channels.
Failure to support different memory widths has been a traditional failing in PC motherboard designs. To keep it simple, consider the old 8 bit wide 30 pin SIMMS. Populating 5,6, or 7 of your 8 memory slots should have worked. In the case of 7, you would have had, say, 4MB of fast 32 bit memory, 2MB of medium speed 16 bit memory, and 1MB of slow 8 bit memory; you would use 4MB for code and the slower 3MB for cache or least recently used code pages (half way between ram and swap). I remember the 68020 family of processors was pretty good at handling this, there were lines the processor used to signal the requested width of the transfer and lines the external peripherals used to signal the actual width. These days with synchronous transfers the CPU would probably want to know the bus width of different memory banks in advance. Newer systems have similar issues with needing to install DIMMs in pairs to get full speed. It would be nice for people on limited budgets to be able to upgrade memory one bank at a time and the processor and motherboard at separate times. And do things like mix slow PC3200 RAM from your old motherboard and fast PC3200 RAM. Some minor OS improvements would be needed to allow the OS to recognize that not all memory is the same speed so slow memory shouldn't be used for speed critical pages. At some point, however, it is better to replace the whole CPU/memory/motherboard combination.
VIA has had several lawsuits going with Intel over their P4 chipsets. VIA says it has a license from when it bought S3 (the video card company) and Intel says, no, hence the lawsuits. Also, Intel used to make most of its own motherboards and chipsets up until the PIII when they started licensing. The Taiwanese chewed them up on chipset and motherboard business and generally ignored the scope and letter of the licensing agreements. When Intel went with the P4, they really clamped down on the license.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
The color A69D78 makes headers and links nearly unreadable. Does anybody else feel the same?
More a personal question than something really germaine to the whole thread, but - what industry are you talking about? Most of the VMS installations that I know about are either academic (and -are- being replaced with Linux boxes - not exclusively, but we can't have everything) or financial. There's plenty of copy on financial institutions running evaluation programs for linux systems and outright "we're doing it" situations, too.
That all said - support is king. If you can't 1. get the solution desired in place and 2. support it for 10 or 15 years (or more) you aren't going to get to Step 3: Profit.
-Most- Linux providers aren't there yet, and will never get there. There really is too much infrastructure involved to support multi-billion dollar long term contracts for RedHat or Novell to pull off effectively. IBM, HP - these companies (and IBM -especially-) have built -huge- support divisions into their companies, and it's what has allowed them to make it through all of the recent economic problems.
This sounds like Intel's Overdrive functionality that came on some 486 mbs...it had that extra socket that I *think* would take an early Pentium chip (or was it something special?) and would get you an effective speed boost without replacing your machine. I remember seeing a fair number of these mbs, but I don't remember if Intel even shipped anything to put in it.
I wonder if it backfired on them at all, I know a friend of mine had a mb with it and by the time Pentiums were all the rage he still had this 486 mb with this extra space that was nothing but promises and hype. I think he ended up getting an AMD-based machine because he was so angry at Intel.
The amount of abject ignorance on display in this thread is staggering, even for Slashdot. Just to hit a quick list of misconceptions and misanalysis:
a) A unified Xeon/Itanium socket for Tukwila has been on Intel's official roadmap for at least a year now, and obviously has been in the works for much longer. This is not news and indeed Intel has been hyping the hell out of it for some time now.
b) The point of this is not to somehow "retire" Itanium (what, by giving Itanium customers the option to "upgrade" to Xeon??) but to drive it into the mainstream by dramatically lowering platform costs. Intel claims Itanium will get 2x the performance on the same socket as Xeon in 2007. Obviously this will depend on the workload, but with Tukwila going against an dual-core MPU based on the ancient NetBurst core, it's not unlikely either. Of course the reason to stay x86 will be for binary compatability, but in many if not most server situations IA-32 EL on Tukwila should provide better x86 performance than the top end Xeon. The point of a unified socket is to phase out Xeon, not Itanium.
Meanwhile, Slashdot has managed to miss today's announcement that the likely future fastest supercomputer in the world will be running Linux. Seems like a slam dunk, right? Linux running the fastest single-image computer in the world? What's the catch? It's running on Itanium, of course.
Must be tough trying to come up with a negative spin on that one. From the but-if-it-was-opteron-it-would-cost-$100,000-less dept., perhaps??
we have a pair of them and it works wonders. the system is very good design that the entire system is very easy to service (swap everything from pci boards, memory boards, processors, management, etc.) and of course good in the reliability and stability side.
the primary feature is reliability, manageability, and servicability. speed is secondary in these systems.
for opterons, their processors are good but i am still doubting on the entire platform (but it is slowly fading away.) i coudn't just buy a server because it is fast without much consideration into servicability, stability and manageability of the system.
by combining the xeon and itanium2 product lines, they will be able to increase these factors more. the resources will now be bigger to validate in the two configurations and design will be much simplified. for example, if an oem manufacturer creates an fc hba, testing will be much faster and better. there may be a separate software code base for the xeon and itanium2. i have seen lots of good plans from intel (though some are still plans but some of them are maturing and i can't say them due to nda.)
in operating a datacenter, this will have huge benefits. if we will get spares, we will only get field replacable units (fru) for the server and we can practically interchange components with our system. this is cost saving but the greater advantage is allowing us to quickly place a server only due to faulty components as they are standardized. in the future, we can have a same server board and all components and spare cpus. aside from hardware efficiency, it will be better for management. the management system will not have to deal with different type of systems. faster fault detection and resolution without much overhead costs of purchasing all the enterprise products. and when deploying new applications, you can have your own internal validation for hardware and software knowing that you will have the same configuration throughout.
by doing this, intel stands to create better platforms realizing from the strengths of both processor architecture. hopefully they will be able to deliver it and even better as planned.
john
and to amd's demise right now, Microsoft just delayed their release of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP for x86-64 to mid 2005.
craig barett also created a memo on improving on engineering efficiencies in intel. he doesn't like what's happening right now.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
You are spot on with your analysis. I think the answer must be option 1 though. 2 can be ruled out because the Itanium has an insignificant market. 3 is a tautology for all enormous tech companies. And 4 is impossible :)
The reason Intel thinks they can use Xeon as a trojan horse for Itanic is Nocona, Intel's X86-64 clone of AMD's Opteron processor. Nocona will satisfy a lot of customers that are impressed by the promise of 64-bit computing but are too chickenshit to go with an AMD product. Once these folks already have a server with the proper socket an upgrade to the new processor will be a little easier.