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HP Terminates Itanium Workstations
vincecate writes "The largest Itanium system maker,
HP, has terminated its Itanium workstations.
It seems their workstation customers have spoken in favor of x64.
In related news, Intel expects to ship
over 100,000 Itaniums in all of 2004
while AMD is estimating
1.5 to 2 million AMD64 chips in Q4."
Architecturally, IA-64 is a very advanced architecture.
Ok, many people don't like it. And OK, it's complex. And OK, many people are making other quite good 64-bit processors.
If its competition was Power or MIPS, then OK, I'd say that the worse it is, let IA-64 die, but x86 (and x86-64 as well) is UGLY and laden with all kinds of OLD JUNK. Come on, it will be junked sooner or later. Granted, Intel can make high-performance x86s, but that at a price of devoting over 1/3 of the stages for decoding!
Or, let's put it that way. It is a Good Thing (TM) to have several different architectures. If all we'll be stuck with will be x86, it'll be quite sad.
If there's one thing I've learned from working in high-tech, it's that no matter how smart and capable the grunts are (engineers, etc.) you always have a dim-witted marketing guy or manager steering projects in the wrong direction (and not listening to criticism).
Good luck finding a proc at that speed needing no fans. Most heat sinks rely on some amount of air movement, so if the proc requires a heat sink, it generally requires a fan.
Even laptop processors run too hot.. The centrino uses a smaller amount of power, proportional to the computation being done. It also implements heat throttling, so I wonder how effective it would be if you remove the fan completely (probably not very effective at all) since the geometry is quite small and the heat density is high.
You could even try going with an Xscale, which runs nearly 1 GHz at 1+ watts. At that power dissipation, it doesn't really need a fan, just a heat sink. It also implements the throttling IIRC, so will not fry if you run it too hard. I don't know if you can buy an OEM board for it though.
Then there's your price issue. I don't think you are going to get all that power savings you want and at the same time save money.
It sounds like what you really want is a super-cheap system to get you by until your next super-cheap upgrade. You may want to permanently stay 5 years behind the consumer curve, which is way on-the-cheap. Try looking at pricewatch for a complete system (your choice of OS). They have older models (such as a 2.0GHz P4, etc) for ~$250.
Amazing, isn't it, that a Honda Civic would outsell such a high end car?!?!!! It just boggles the mind.
The Opteron isn't in the same league as the Itanium, no matter how much AMDroids wish it were. AMD needs to be comparing Opteron/AMD64 sales to Xeon/Pentium4 sales. Itanium is a very high end processor and it's one of the best you can buy for certain high-end applications.
Not to say Intel didn't make a mistake in trying to push Itanium too early as a general purpose CPU - it's clearly not.
HP's current innovation strategy may be sumarized in the their unwritten Mission statement:
Carly Gets Paid.
Under Carly, the Calculator division has had the guts ripped out of it, the printer division has had the guys ripped out of it, the server division has had the guts ripped out of it.
Um.. what else does HP make?
And Carly gets her US$20m a year, despite the fact that none of her "innovations" have moved the company forward.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
VMS. The forgotten OS. I've come across a bunch of discarded VAXStations, and have started to play around with VMS. Makes me wish I could afford modern hardware to run it on, as it seems to be a pretty neat OS.
What was Intel thinking?
An architecture switch breaking x86 ISA compatibility (i.e. emulation is noticeably slower than the original item) would put it on a level playing field with other 64-bit workstation/server-class chips, yet they never seemed to offer either world-beating design improvements or substantial price benefits, or appear as though they would in the future.
Intel decided to break with the past and start fresh, in hopes that they could make a large leap forward. That's a good goal. But what actually happened was a couple of things:
1. Their experiment failed, in that they didn't get the monstrous across-the-board benefits they expected.
2. They started this back in the days of the Pentium, when it looked like the x86 CPU architecture and instruction set were the big problems. The Itanium design team didn't forsee the crazy lengths that would be taken--by both Intel and AMD--in order to speed up the crappy x86 architecture.
Honestly, you can't fault Intel for trying. Where did chips like the ARM and MIPS come from (two of the most popular non-desktop processors)? From designing a new architecture. That's the same kind of thinking that resulted in the amazing GPUs from ATI and nVidia.
As a footnote, it's somewhat sad to see radical advances in CPUs come to a halt. I'd love to see someone set the industry on its ear.
1) When the IA-64 design first became public, it was clear that they'd made some incredibly poor decisions. For example, the architectural design was based on the assumption that the chip would not do out-of-order execution in hardware. Such deficiences were to be remedied by a god-like compiler that would emerge at some later date. Unsurprisingly, it never has.
2) These predictions were borne out by the fact that Itanium performance has always sucked, especially considering the enormous die size, cost and heat dissipation.
3) It looked like Itanium might win in the market despite its technical limitations, just because of Intel's vast marketing budget, its momentum, and its monopoly leverage forcing OEMs to stay away from technically superior alternatives like AMD64.
4) Thankfully this hasn't happened. The technically superior, open solution is winning. Thanks AMD.
Yeah, HP is turning into a bunch of vacuum cleaner salesmen, just like Dell.
Luckily some of the old HP spirit is left in Agilent.
We can only speculate.
I've heard rumours that Intel wanted to do something radical in the architecture because it would be harder for other vendors (AMD) to clone. That could have forced them into their VLIW design.
When IA-64 was conceived (mid 90s) some research groups (e.g. IMPACT at Illinois) were touting in-order VLIWs with compiler support as the way of the future. Their research had problems but perhaps some key Intel/HP engineers bought into it.
Now imagine that the IA-64 project got rolling and after a few years you've aligned the company around the project and sunk a billion dollars or two into it. Maybe you've even talked it up in the press or with analysts. Many of your best and most senior engineers have staked their careers on the project. Now suppose some of your people have doubts. How hard would it be for them to persuade the company to flush it? Near impossible, I suspect.
It's scary how close we all came to watching AMD go under and IA-64 taking over in spite its inferiority. It would have been a terrible example of monopoly power leading to bad outcomes. Fortunately at this point it's only a matter of time before IA-64 is cancelled. It can't compete with x64 chips which are essentially equivalent but ship in 10x-100x of the volume.
If you really like what Apple and IBM are doing with and for Open source, support them by buying their hardware and running whatever operating system you wish (be it linux for PPC, one of the BSD's or OSX).
I laugh when I see open source advocated saying how evil MS is and yet they probably helped put MSFT in the position they are now in by not buying Corel/Wordperfect products instead of MS Office and buying PC's bundled with Windows instead of now dead platforms like the BeBox, Commodore Amiga, Next Cube. Even if they had bought macs from Apple, MS would not have the power it now has in the industry and Corel/Wordperfect would still have a significant portion of the office market.
I also feel that Open Office should stop trying to closely emulate MS Office and try to produce something much better.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
You would be surprised how many others did.
When HP stopped being about engineering and started being about ham-fisted second rate marketing - well, I won't buy any of their products except printers and even there, i'm investigating other solutions.
Carly Fiorina will end up being the person who drove a stake through the heart of that company.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
No, we're all cheering for AMD for a number of reasons.
Their decision to support 32-bit mode in their x86 64 bit platform was a wise decisions and all of us knew that.
Furthermore, AMD keeps forcing Intel to innovate. As long as AMD is around, CPU's will get faster and better and do more per cycle.
Without AMD, we'd not have good competition, and Intel could comfortably cut their R&D costs to turn a bigger profit - their only rival would be PowerPC, and it's not a x86 platform. Let's not forget, Intel is first responsible to its shareholders.
Furthermore without competition, rest assured we'd already have DRM shoved down our throats too.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
The Itanium is a high-end workstation/server chip. ONLY.
Not anymore it's not. Delete "workstation" from that sentence.
Whoever submitted this article seems to think that every AMD64 sold is going to be going into the high-end server market.
No, he just thinks that disparate total sales actually mean something. The AMD64 is good for workstations, servers, laptops, email, and videogames. Itanium is now server-only. The fact that AMD64 has so many consumer sales actually makes it more attractive for high end use, because the volume drives the per-chip cost way down, and boosts R&D reinvestment.
They'd have to admit they were wrong, first.
I just don't see that happening. Plus while it may not cost them much to reopen production lines, it would take them away from where they want the market to go, Alpha, as an architecture, was a lot more than just the chip, and performed accordingly. It wasn't just a Math Machine, but also an I/O Machine, for several of the choices made(like having a daughterboard and per-cpu memory in my many configurations, kept bus traffic low, and needed basically less Mhz for the same speed as long as cpu localization was enabled) increasing that trend. Alphas and SPARCs used to be favorite workstation chips for that very reason, not just calculations, but I/O(lots of applications require both, like finite elements). Servers are also I/O hungry, and it makes sense that a chip for one would do well in the other. Now I notice that the bang for the buck department, especially if you factor in I/O and other considerations, Itanic doesn't inspire HP, which, as the people who took their PA chips and merged them with Intel's, are the ones who had the most investment in its success, I can only conclude Itanic sunk...
With Intel selling cpus but having to license ASUS/VIA/ABIT etc... for motherboards, Intel would lose part of the profits. Itanic was a lot more than just a new chip, it was an attempt to kick competitors out, leaving HP and Intel with a dominant position. Thankfully for geeks everywhere, it mostly backfired.
I also believe Intel had to give up the alpha somehow, to a consortium of companies interested in the Alpha chip itself, leader of which was Samsung, at the time.
Yes, and don't call me sloane.
Oh, right.
As an MBA in training, I can see exactly where MBA and technology diverge. MBAs are great for ideas on how to manage people, finances, suppliers, clients, to anticipate market trends etc etc... and a name school gets you great contacts (what I don't have.. but hey, its 1/10th the price of the Harvard BS course).
What it doesn't teach you is how to work R&D. The economics of R&D don't work the same way as everything else does. IBM get it. Xerox got it. AT&T may still get it. Sun hopefully will get it again.S
Stuff you do now may pay off for years. In some cases for IBM and AT&T, decades. MBAs don't think on those scales. Long term is 8 quarters... 2 years.
Carly might be great in charge of the Sales part of HP, the pure commerse stuff... but she doesn't have any idea about how to run and engineering firm because she's not an engineer.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
You're repeating the original press releases from 1999. What we've learned since then (and everyone except Intel and HP knew before) is that predicting branches, load addresses and schedules at compile time, without much runtime knowledge, is far harder than it is for the chip to do it at run time, no matter how smart your compiler is. Much of the time, it's just impossible.
Predication's nice, but it wastes resources when you can predict branches accurately, which you can most of the time. And the big bottleneck is not branch misprediction pipeline flushes (~30 cycles), it's cache misses (100-1000 cycles). That's where Itanium really hurts.
But I know that people will keep talking about the "forward-looking" "greater headroom" IA-64 architecture right up until it gets cancelled.
They're only in a different class because you and Intel say so. Actual customers buy Opterons and Itania to do same sorts of things. (And Athlon64, while it's targeted at a different market, runs the same software and is largely the same internally as Opteron, so AMD gets the volume advantage.)