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HP Terminates Itanium Workstations

Posted by michael on from the writing-on-the-wall dept.

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."

119 of 472 comments (clear)

  1. The good news by raider_red · · Score: 5, Funny

    I've heard that HP actually sold both of the Itaniums they had in inventory, so there shouldn't be too much to write off.

    --
    It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
    1. Re:The good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      When questioned about the termination, HP then asked about the location of one "Sarah Conner", and stated, "I'll be back..."

  2. x64? by suso · · Score: 3, Funny

    Isn't x64 the program that runs the VICE C64 emulator? ;-)

  3. How Ironic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    HP killed Alpha in favor of Itanium. Which in turn happenh to be dead at birth.


    Makes me think about their technical vision ...

    1. Re:How Ironic by cyngus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      HP got what they deserved. They toddled over to Intel for the Itanium and knifed the Alpha when Alpha was the better technology. Now they get the egg on their face as they run to join AMD's game. I'm happy for AMD, they're a good company (and I own their stock), but HA HA for HP.

    2. Re:How Ironic by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting
      HP killed Alpha in favor of Itanium. Which in turn happenh to be dead at birth.

      Makes me think about their technical vision ...

      Intel sued by DEC for stealing Alpha technology for Pentium

      Intel agrees to buy production plant, pay undisclosed cash, continue to make Alphas for DEC

      Merced goes on for years, uses lots of Alpha technology.

      Revamped as Itanium

      Sells for huge $$$$ when it hits the market

      Still sells for $$$$

      Intel gets clubbed like a baby harp seal by AMD x64

      Seems somewhere in that long build up to the release of the Itanium they forgot how they made their money in the first place. Psst! Processors are a commodity.

      Intel may have a lot of better technology than AMD, but AMD has clearly shown they've learned a lot about getting a product out there.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    3. Re:How Ironic by Mateito · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Makes me think about their technical vision ...

      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
    4. Re:How Ironic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, if you think about it, half of the Alpha engineers ended up working for AMD and helped making both the Athlon and the Opteron cpus, so it's some kind of return to home :)

      Turbo Smorgreff

    5. Re:How Ironic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >>what else does HP make

      Inkjet cartridges. She has decided on the Gillette business model and in the process killed off one hell of an R&D department.

    6. Re:How Ironic by joib · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:How Ironic by Rauser · · Score: 5, Funny
      What else does HP make?

      iPods... oh wait...

      --
      The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you need to load or unload go to the white zone. It's a way of life
    8. Re:How Ironic by DAldredge · · Score: 2, Funny

      This is what happens when you hire a medieval history major to be your CEO. Look up what Carly the Butchers degree is in.

    9. Re:How Ironic by ahdeoz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The fact of the matter is that 32 bits turned out to be enough for just about everyone. In the 1990s everyone rushed out and bought 64 bit CPUs (and SUNW soared) before there even existed feasible consumer technology to have enough memory (or even disk) space to address more than 32 bits. In large part this was because everyone remembered how big of a leap moving from 16 to 32 registers was. But in even larger part because they didn't realize how big of a leap moving from 16 to 32 bits really was. In 1993 everyone knew what EMM was. In 2003, nobody outside of a very few kernel hackers even worried about the the way extended memory was managed. Most of AMDs 64 bit sales are to home systems anyway. Why? Because it's faster than their 32 bit architecture. And because it's cool. But an Alpha was a cool architecture. I'd like to see that spread.

    10. Re:How Ironic by Short+Circuit · · Score: 3, Interesting

      With the move to dual-core processors, you'll be able to up that to 16-way SMP. AMD was smart enough to plan K8 as a multi-core architecture as far back as the late 90s.

      Intel's known about this, yet their first dual-core P4s are going to have one tap on the memory bus per core, instead of arbitration logic to keep it at one bus tap per die, thereby keeping their bus speeds up.

      Long Live AMD. :)

      --
      tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
    11. Re:How Ironic by Izmunuti · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If you ask me, the wrong company got to keep the HP name when they split. I used to think of great calcs, scopes, and logic analyzers when I thought "HP". Now I just try not to think of them at all.

      Perhaps when Carly gets done bleeding HP dry, Agilent can buy back the name on the cheap. By then, though, they may not want it.

      Agilent needs to come out with a nice, well-built RPN calculator...

    12. Re:How Ironic by Erik+Hollensbe · · Score: 2, Informative

      Um, to their benefit, Itanium was not, nor ever will be, a workstation processor. Heck, it's not even a "serve-your-shitty-perl-app-over-the-web" processor.

      It's a HPC processor. It does complex math and it does it well. AMD64 is much more general in scope and therefore, you are comparing apples and oranges.

      AMD64 might have some clout in the hobbyist section of this group, but the guys doing the "real work" are doing it on Itanium and will be for a long time.

      If you're interested, you should read the beowulf list instead of cracking bad jokes about it on slashdot.

    13. Re:How Ironic by dillon_rinker · · Score: 2, Informative

      "Itanium was not, nor ever will be, a workstation processor" - Erik Hollensbe, 2004

      Heh. I've heard that before:
      "The Pentium Pro is a server CPU; it is not suitable for desktop use.." - Intel, 1996

      "The Pentium II, based on the Pentium Pro core..." - Intel, 1999

      "The 486 is intended as a CPU for high-end computing needs." - Intel, 1991

    14. Re:How Ironic by roca · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > Heck, it's not even a
      > serve-your-shitty-perl-app-over-the-web"
      > processor.

      Well that's too bad for Intel, because that's where the money is.

    15. Re:How Ironic by Erik+Hollensbe · · Score: 2, Funny

      Uh... All timely, right decisions too. Your point?

      If they come up with a "commodity processor" based on Itanium (you know, like the PII was for the PPro), it might do well.

      That said, I was building servers and teching machines when the PII came out. Before that (and for some time after), we installed PPro's in servers. The only dumbasses who bought PPro's for their workstations were trustafarians and scary geeks who constantly had a stain of cheeto crust on their fingers and needed "the best money could buy".

    16. Re:How Ironic by Mateito · · Score: 4, Insightful
      what about that MBA from that fluff business school, sloane?

      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
    17. Re:How Ironic by Tanktalus · · Score: 3, Informative

      Strange ... being in the database business, I'm getting the distinct impression from my management that we're following the money ... to AMD64.

      From my perspective, IA64 is already dead.

    18. Re:How Ironic by Fulcrum+of+Evil · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Um, to their benefit, Itanium was not, nor ever will be, a workstation processor. Heck, it's not even a "serve-your-shitty-perl-app-over-the-web" processor.
      It's a HPC processor.

      It's a low-volume proc. Intel will either watch as the Itanium is eclipsed by everybody+dog or lose money on the whole thing. Generic processors beat niche every time - that's how Intel made their fortune.

      --
      "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
    19. Re:How Ironic by corngrower · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually, the true spirit of HP follows to Agilent.
      HP was originally in the scientific instrument business. That makes Agilent the true successor, not the current computer company HP. I'ld say what remains at HP are mostly the ruins of DEC, and Compaq. The best of those companies seems to have left for other opportunities.

    20. Re:How Ironic by ckaminski · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Wrong, the fact of the matter is that VLIW (EPIC) sucks ass for general purpose computing, and Intel was counting on a fundamentally exponential improvement in compiler technology to make it work. When the universe finally figured out that dynamic scheduling and execution in hardware is where you're best off spending your time and money, it was too late to kill the Itanic beast. The problem in multiprocessing environments involves loop-unrolling and reducing memory accesses: you cannot do this safely if your running in a threaded or SMP environment, so compiler improvements are only going to bring you so much.

      And Alpha was *THE* 64 bit king. SGI only had a toe-up in the video world because of their top-notch video processing hardware, something that companies like Accelgraphics and Integraph were attempting to remedy on the PCI based alpha boxes (Those designed to run NT as well as VMS).
      Sun continued to dominate simply because Solaris didn't suck as bad as Digital Unix/Tru64. HP was a complete non-starter performance-wise, hence their bet on Itanic/Intel. The fact that history would literally dump the EV6/EV7 architecture into their hands is ironic. And sad.

    21. Re:How Ironic by PeterM+from+Berkeley · · Score: 3, Informative


      So far as I can tell, the HPC shops are largely shunning the Itanium.

      I have access to about 10 supercomputers at various locations: not one of them is based on the Itanium. We have clusters based on Xeons, clusters based on Opterons, machines based on Alpha 21264, IBM computers based on Power4 processors, and Cray X1s, based on their own proprietary chips.

      But *not one* machine based on Itaniums.
      On the Top500 Supercomputing sites list, only 13/500 are using Itaniums. 14/500 are using AMD processors.....

      The Itanium may be an HPC processor, but it's one that the HPC community mostly doesn't want.

      --PM

    22. Re:How Ironic by ckaminski · · Score: 2, Informative

      And there you are wrong. Itanium *WAS* designed as a general purpose CPU. And which Merced sucked royally, life got better in subsequent versions when Intel made improvements in the design. No, Itanium has failed because it cannot do the 32bit transition as well as every other processor in the past has done. MIPS R3000-R4000. Alpha 32-64 with OSF/Digital Unix/Tru64. Sun. AMD. Everyone but Intel figured it out. You cannot make the move to 64bits in general purpose computing if you do not make the 32bit software run fast.

      Intel is not in the business of making special purpose CPUs. That's something Cray and Sequent (IIRC) wer famous for, and look where it got them?

      Intel makes general purpose CPUs and is very good at it. i960 (you may argue this :-D) , Pentium, PIII, Pentium-M. Itanium was a bad idea, and their repositioning it as an HPC processor proves it. It will forever be marginalized. I expect it will have a shorter lifespan than the Alpha will.

  4. Could it be? by KingKire64 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I AMD has caught up to intel a couple of times in the desktop market only to fall back again. Could this be the time that they leapfrog over Intel and be far and away leader in a market? One could only hope. In a tech world of dominate players (Intel, MS) its nice to see the underdog win with a superior product.

    --
    "All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
    1. Re:Could it be? by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 4, Informative

      "AMD chipsets support slower CPU to memory times than Intel (32bit or 64bit) counterparts. "

      Bzzzt... wrong answer.

      In AMD64 chips, the chipset doesn't have the memory controller - it's in the CPU.

      AMD's CPU-to-DDR latency is much lower than Intel's.

    2. Re:Could it be? by Nazmun · · Score: 4, Informative

      I can't believe this was modded up...

      A64 FX's and Opterons support dual channel ddr and have much lower latencies then intel at the same mhz (400mhz ddr X 2). Usually the FX's and Opteron's win the memory bandwidth benchmarks.

      As low power AMD has a line of mobile barton core processors that use as little power as 45 and even 35 watts. They can also be placed in a destop motherboard. The xp2400 35 watt is also under $100. But there is a good chance the pentium-m uses less power but they are only found on certain laptops (can't be bought).

      --
      Hmmm... Pie...
  5. There goes VMS on the desktop again... by bpechter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The only reason I'd consider IA64 on my desktop was if it was a VMS Workstation...

    Damn... First the Alpha killed then this.
    Guess it's up to SimH on Athlon or P4 to emulate one.

    I wish the hell HP ported VMS to IA32 instead 8-).

    Bill

    1. Re:There goes VMS on the desktop again... by darkjedi521 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:There goes VMS on the desktop again... by BJH · · Score: 3, Informative

      Buy a secondhand Alpha (a 21164-based machine is very cheap, and a 21264 machine only a bit more) - most of them are capable of running the last versions of VMS.

  6. AMD64 include consumer processors by hattig · · Score: 5, Informative

    AMD sold around 100,000 Opterons in Q2 however. This should increase to 200,000 in Q3 given recent products from HP, Sun, IBM etc, especially with the increase in 4P systems.

    Of course, the ASP of Itanium is a lot higher, so Intel need to sell a lot fewer Itaniums to get the same money back as AMD. On the other hand, AMD haven't sunk $billions into K8!

  7. Top 10 by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Funny

    Top 10 Itanic jokes:

    10. HP decided that they didn't want to go down with the Itanic
    9. Hear that flushing sound? That's billions of dollars being invested into a lemon.
    8. HP must of realized it was a 64-bit Pinto.
    7. HP's just upset that they didn't get to sit on the bow and yell, "I'm the King of Computers!"
    6. HP's Itanic line is sunk.
    5. "The Itanic is the most advanced chip of her kind. She's practically unsinkable!"
    4. HP didn't want to be compared to Leonardo Di Caprio
    3. HP Execs suddenly realized that Di Caprio dies in the end
    2. Intel assured HP that the Itanic was not sinking, despite being hit by a AMDBerg
    1. "My clock wiiilllll, count on and on!"

    Sorry, I just couldn't resist. :-D

    --
    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    1. Re:Top 10 by KingKire64 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Horrible, simply horrible.

      Eck

      --
      "All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
    2. Re:Top 10 by lcsjk · · Score: 2, Funny

      I've seen ever one!

  8. A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility by celerityfm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    AMD deserves the win here for pushing 32 bit backwards compatibility, Intel had to and still is playing catch-up with them in this arena.

    Good job AMD!

    --
    ...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
    1. Re:A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility by Rakshasa+Taisab · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yeah, pushsing for backward compatibility to a 32 bit CPU that is compatible with a 16 bit CPU with lots of weird modes is great. Really, it is.

      --
      - These characters were randomly selected.
    2. Re:A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Backwards compatibility? Why? I mean you can just recompile, right?

      Tell that to Microsoft.

      Microsoft is running most of their software on AMD64 in 32bit, thanks to that backward compatibility, but you know they're sweating over getting full 64 out, since Linux has been 64.

      Funny how Intel and Microsoft have to scramble to keep up with underdogs, isn't it?

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    3. Re:A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility by aristotle-dude · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Exactly. If you guys really hate MS and Intel, stop supporting them.

      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.
    4. Re:A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility by VirtualAdept · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Well..

      Given that AMD's goal has to be to make money, which requires that they get customers, it would seem that it is a great idea. Customers seem to like the idea of their applications continuing to work.

      I honestly don't know what Intel was thinking, to be honest. Did they really think that users were going to jump to using a 64-bit chip, which had something like a 1/10th of the applications available for it as x86, just because Intel made it?

    5. Re:A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 2, Informative

      Lots of people by Xeons to play games. What to you think the P4EE is?

      64bit software runs faster on the amd64 than 32bit software - any slowdown due to larger instruction size (negligable since the 64bit data path can read more data in parallel anyway) is more than offset by the vastly increased number of registers.

    6. Re:A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility by sadtrev · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm a 'seriously disturbed math doctorate with research to do' but even so, six months ago when I had to spend grant money on some hardware to do big CFD analyses I didn't buy an Itanium. I looked at the numbers and the price of systems, even considering per-processor software license costs, and the Opteron was the no brainer.

  9. Re:hp server by essreenim · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yeah, I buy all my servers from lizard man.
    He doesn't provide 24/7 technical support but he will harass your family for free.

  10. How the times change... by Kazymyr · · Score: 4, Funny

    I remember 5 or 6 years ago the new 64-bit chips from Intel were "hot" with everyone talking about them, and also supposedly right around the corner in terms of schedule. AMD surely stole their thunder on this.

    O tempora...

    --
    I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
  11. Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I guess because (for some moronic reason) AMD are "good guys" and Intel are "bad guys" we just have to get all giggly and rub their noses in it.

    BFD. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Some products take off, some don't.

    Itanium looks like a good architecture for transaction processing, at least on paper. Turns out the market was more interested in backwards compatibility.

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
    1. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by ultrabot · · Score: 2, Informative

      I guess because (for some moronic reason) AMD are "good guys" and Intel are "bad guys" we just have to get all giggly and rub their noses in it.

      IA64 is proprietary and closed, AMD64 is not. That's why Intel are the bad guys as far as this Itanic thing is concerned. Also, if they are selling something you will never be able to buy to your home, it's natural to root for the solution that you might very well be able to afford yourself.

      --
      Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
    2. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by gmack · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's not that good.. Itanium is overdesigned and assumed the compilor will know things it just can't know at compile time.

      They shifted too many things off of the CPU and into software when that didn't preform well they started trying to optimise it. It's a situation that reminds me of NT and microkernels.

      The result is something that needs a huge die size just to preform on par with the Xeon and thanks to the huge die size it will always be priced much higher. I keep hearing that smaller transistors will fix this problem but everything they benchamark against will get those too.

      Intel really missed the boat on this one.. a more intellegent route would have been emt-64 without the 16 and 32 bit backward compatability.

    3. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by roca · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by stratjakt · · Score: 2, Insightful

      IA64 is proprietary and closed, AMD64 is not.

      Is that a joke? How is IA-64 "proprietary and closed?"

      IA-64 was never supposed to be a home desktop CPU anyways.

      Compare AMD-64 sales to Xeon and Pentium 4.

      Like another poster said, this is like being shocked that Honda sells more cars than Bentley.

      --
      I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
    5. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Such deficiences were to be remedied by a god-like compiler that would emerge at some later date. Unsurprisingly, it never has.

      Yeah. A few years ago, the compiler guys from HP came over to Stanford to speak about Itanium compilers. They didn't have a clue how to solve the problems they faced.

    6. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by roca · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Its performance is really bad considering how honking huge the chip is. Itanium2 (Madison) is 500M transistors. Opteron is slightly over 100M. Not to mention the price...

    7. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by rainman_bc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    8. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by roca · · Score: 2, Informative

      > The Intel fortran, C, and C++ compilers for the
      > Itanium for Windows and Linux are pretty godlike
      > in my experience.

      I'm sure they're good, but they're not good enough.

      > Look at AMD benchmarks and usually they are done
      > with the Intel compiler.

      That'd be the x86 compiler, not the Itanium compiler.

      > Your definition of sucked differs from mine.

      Stringing vast arrays of processors together to build supercomputers tells you almost nothing about the performance of the individual processors.

      You'd have done better to quote SpecFP numbers, but see my comment above about relative transistor count. IA-64 just doesn't give much bang for the buck (or transistor). If you strap a jet engine to a pig, sure it'll fly.

      > Coke does the same thing over RC cola. Windows
      > does this over OS X.

      Yeah, and we don't have to like it.

    9. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by afidel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Because you couldn't make a compiler for IE-64 without Intel's permission because everything was copyrighted and patented, you also couldn't make a compatible chip for the same reason. On the other hand AMD published all of their spec's for x86-64 and allowed anyone who wanted to produce a compatible chip. Don't kid yourself Intel would have loved to have had everyone move over to IA-64 based systems so that they could have been done with the AMD/Cyrix/Transmetta/etc competition forever. I'm sure if IA-64 would have taken off at all they would have made the equivilant of a Celeron with reduced cache siza and functional units.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    10. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by timeOday · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I guess because (for some moronic reason) AMD are "good guys" and Intel are "bad guys" we just have to get all giggly and rub their noses in it.
      "Some moronic reason?" Where were you when the rest of us were paying $700 for a Pentium-100 cpu? For years computers got faster but the price didn't come down at all. It didn't matter whether you wanted a fast one or not, you couldn't buy a $70 CPU, period. If we like AMD it's becase they saved us loads of cash - and "us" includes people who never bought an AMD processor!
    11. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by roca · · Score: 4, Informative

      Predication and explicit speculative loads were primarily added to the IA-64 architecture because they'd decided not to implement out-of-order execution (dynamic scheduling) and other dynamic techniques*. They aren't nearly as important on a modern superscalar processor.

      (* Itanium2 doesn't even do next-line prefetching!)

      Explicit speculative loads was a major mistake because in many kinds of code the compiler cannot place speculative loads far enough ahead of the actual use for it to pay off. Often the address to be loaded from is simply not known far in advance of the load (consider executing the C code "x = a->b->c"). So Itaniums spend a lot of time stalled waiting on memory accesses. That's why Intel spends so many transistors on gigantic on-chip caches, to try to reduce that pain. The architecture's pretty good for workloads with very regular and compiler-analyzable access patterns (regular number crunching, SpecFP) but it's bad for everything else (servers, user applications, irregular numeric codes).

      Yes, IA-64 is a aggressive, radical, clean and somewhat novel design, so it's understandable that some geeks love it. However, it is not a good design.

      If it was a good design, then with Intel engineering, 5x the transistor count, and no backward compatibility requirements, it would be absolutely crushing Opteron performance. Instead it is merely competitive.

      BTW it is quite odd to consider IA-64 a small tweak over RISC chips. IA-64 is the most dissimilar of all viable architectures today.

  12. bring back alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why doesn't Intel just get over the NIH syndrome and start fabbing the Alpha (proven design, existing software base, the geeks love it)... Don't they own the rights for it via some legal-fall out with Compaq?

    - Friendly A.C.

    1. Re:bring back alpha by perlchild · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  13. What about servers? by Lank · · Score: 3, Informative

    The article says that they killing the workstation Itanium line. What about the server Itanium line? I find it hard to believe that they would just throw up their hands and calls it quits - especially because they funded a fair portion of the development of the chip.

    --
    Gotta get me one of these!
    1. Re:What about servers? by MtViewGuy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What about the server Itanium line?

      I think the Itanium-based servers will continue to be sold because the strength of the Itanium CPU is specifically for large-volume server-based operations.

      AMD's Opteron/Athlon64 has succeeded because 1) they are VASTLY cheaper than Itanium CPU's and 2) incorporating the memory controller into the CPU die means that the Opteron/Athlon64 CPU's have nearly as much computing power as the Itanium CPU but does offer the advantages of keeping compatibility with most x86-based apps out there with a very straightforward growth to 64-bit apps down the road.

    2. Re:What about servers? by Orgazmus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So putting much money into a chip means that you should'nt pull out when you know its a bad chip?
      The only way of getting even after losing money is losing more money?

      --
      The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
    3. Re:What about servers? by joib · · Score: 4, Informative

      Of course, they're pledging to continue selling Itanium servers.

      In the longer run, IMHO it sounds somewhat problematic, considering that all the engineers developing software will be running on x86-64. I.e. the software will first be available on x86-64, more tested etc.

      So why should the customer shell out money for an Itanium server instead of an x86-64 server which has better bang-per-buck and runs the software more reliably? In the short run HP can probably contain x86-64 in low end servers, keeping high end stuff reserved for Itanic. But in the long run, they'll have to start providing higher end x86-64 gear too, or their customers will move to a competitor that will.

  14. Re:Low power CPUs? by hattig · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not much. Apart from the Pentium-M, for which there exists a couple of motherboards outside the laptop market ... Transmeta's new Efficeon should run at 1.5GHz. VIA's C7 might make 1.5GHz when it is released.

    AMD sell a 35W Opteron, 1.8GHz I believe, I'm not sure. Maybe it is 55W @ 2GHz.

    OTOH AMD's consumer processors include Cool'n'Quiet which downclocks the processor when you don't need lots of processing power, and hence cuts the power consumption a lot. With a decent fan the fan will also slow down.

    Or get an iMac G5.

  15. All together now... by Delusional · · Score: 2, Funny

    Competition is good for market economies. Monopolies suck.

  16. Should have stuck with Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Remember, these guys did have DEC/Alpha and PA-RISC.

    What the hell were they thinking.

    1. Re:Should have stuck with Alpha by Kevin+Burtch · · Score: 4, Informative


      Exactly what I was thinking.
      HP and Intel deserve this for killing off the two most powerful processor lines in history.

      Back when PA-RISC and Alpha were in production, the gap between them and the next fastest CPU lines were staggering. I used to check the CPU Info Center at Berkeley every time a new one was released, just to see how badly it humiliated the competition (sadly, the CPU Info Center is no longer maintained).

      The Athlon (before it was named such) uses the Alpha's bus... and the original slot-A design was compatible with both the Alpha and the Athlon, all you would need to sell a motherboard for the other one is a different BIOS. This was the selling point that convinced many motherboard manufacturers to actually make these boards. Unfortunately, only a tiny handful of companies actually marketed the resulting systems using the Alpha CPUs (mostly in Linux Journal & Linux Magazine as rackmount servers).

      They could have done so much more... oh well.
      My current favorites are UltraSPARC and PowerPC (with POWER close behind).

      --
      - Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
    2. Re:Should have stuck with Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      You have got to be kidding. UltraSPARC is dog breath compared to PowerPC, let alone POWER4+. The new IBM P5 systems make it look like dog sh*t.

      It's my job to evaluate, amongst other things, processor performance for use in a grid-enabled batch transaction applications. The only CPU slower than UltraSPARC III Cu @ 1.2 GHz is the HP PA-RISC 8700 and 8700+, and that's so old the industry was playing ring around the dinosaur when it was introduced.

      The fastest CPU for this is kind of work is, believe it or not, the Xeon MP chips at 3.0 GHz or greater with 1 MB L3 cache or greater. It's even faster than the dual core POWER4+ @ 1.7 GHz. Too bad you have to live with a 32-bit memory model.

      We've been evaluating AMD Opteron against our application - *very* promising.

    3. Re:Should have stuck with Alpha by mikefe · · Score: 2

      "POWER is a implementation of PowerPC architecture"

      You've got to be kidding me. PowerPC is a *cut-down* version of the POWER architecture!

      Check out these references here, here, here, and here.

      --
      There: Something at a specific location.
      Their: Owned by someone.
      Please make sure your english compiles.
  17. Re:hp server by ultrabot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Let me put it this way. I would not buy a server from HP anyway.

    I don't think they will care. Most people in the business of buying servers seem to do. Comp... er, HP Proliants are probably the most popular Linux servers at the moment.

    --
    Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
  18. What gives them the right? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny
    I bought my Itanium workstation fair and square. Now HP thinks it can terminate it? I guess I should have figured that this evil corporation would include back doors in their products that lets them terminate any system they want. What's next? Will Dodge remotely total my Neon?

    This shows how big a problem proprietary closed lock-in has become. Well, I've got a message for HP: Bring it on! You can pry my workstation from m%#y co%@$(

  19. So, question for the crowd... by Featureless · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    This looked like a loser from the first minute I saw it, and I obviously wasn't the only one: I mean, the chip has been "The Itanic" in Register parlance for years now.

    Intel, for all their flaws, is a smart company with a lot of smart people working for it. I must just not be seeing the whole picture. They must have had some good reason not to have flushed this project years ago, right?

    --

    Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
    1. Re:So, question for the crowd... by HungSoLow · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Intel, for all their flaws, is a smart company with a lot of smart people working for it. I must just not be seeing the whole picture. They must have had some good reason not to have flushed this project years ago, right?

      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).

    2. Re:So, question for the crowd... by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:So, question for the crowd... by roca · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:So, question for the crowd... by captaineo · · Score: 2, Funny
      They must have had some good reason not to have flushed this project years ago, right?


      I think it's the sunk cost fallacy - "we've already spent $X billion on this, let's throw a few more billion at it until it works."

    5. Re:So, question for the crowd... by e40 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      They were not thinking. They were being arrogant.

      I have a hypothesis: it was a power play to eliminate all competition. It would have been difficult for AMD and others to follow them down this IA64 road.

      Corrolary: Intel wanted to establish compiler dominance. I work for a compiler company that produces every part of the source to machine translation for our compiler. Intel told us we would not be able to do an IA64 port all the way to machine code and that we'd have to use their assembler. This was shocking. Upon probing this, the Intel guy would not relent. He said it was near impossible for anyone but Intel to produce machine code for IA64. For over 20 years we've done countless ports, to some really weird hardware. Our expert said it would take 2 years to do the port. The most time we *ever* spent doing a port was a year and that was for a Cray (and a lot of that was for operating system interface issues).

    6. Re:So, question for the crowd... by Fulcrum+of+Evil · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      The architecture is actually rather nice now. It's only the instruction set that sucks, and that's a fairly small part of the transistor count.

      Honestly, you can't fault Intel for trying.

      Nope, but I can fault them for not knifing this thing in 97 or 98.

      --
      "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
    7. Re:So, question for the crowd... by red+floyd · · Score: 2, Informative

      You forgot the long ago and unlamented iAPX432.

      Attempts to get away from x86:

      iAPX432
      i860
      i960 (still viable in the embedded market)
      IA-64.

      --
      The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
  20. Re:Low power CPUs? by stratjakt · · Score: 2, Informative

    Get a 1.8-2 gig celeron, they're cheap and fast. With the same video/RAM/mobo config, Doom 3 plays the exact same on the 1.8 Celeron as it does on a 3.06 P4 with HT (at least from what I could tell).

    I only say 1.8 because IIRC, that's as slow as you can get on a Socket 478 mobo, and you probably don't want a 423 based board, because it's likely to only support SDRAM or RDRAM.

    Get one of those big Zalman passive heatsinks if you don't want a fan. Just be careful moving the machine or find a way to brace it properly. I bolted mine through the mobo and directly to the steel backplate of the case, all stress on the case and not the mobo. I just dont trust a plastic clip to secure a half kilo of copper just inches above my Radeon 9800.

    The newer prescott based Celeron D's perform like a champ (as in, really close to their P4 counterparts) from the reviews I've seen. I think they start at 2.4 gigs.

    Stay away from bleeding edge stuff. It's just a waste of money, and won't improve your computing "experience", unless you consider bragging about artificial benchmark scores "computing".

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  21. Re:Low power CPUs? by wikinerd · · Score: 3, Informative

    90nm Athlon64s 939 soon to be available!
    90nm A64s seem to draw much less power than 130nm A64s.

    There is also Transmeta which produces the Efficeon CPU and VIA which makes EPIA.
    You may also get an AMD Geode :)

  22. Itanium will crush all... hardly by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The interesting thing is 3 RISC chips were killed because of the threat of Intel - MIPS (well, at least in workstations, embedded lives on), Alpha, and PA-RISC. PA-RISC even had a technology that could be seen as the opposite of EPIC, instead of moving scheduling logic to the compiler, they actually moved some of the optimization the compiler could do to the chip itself, since it knew current state of the machine and the compiler couldn't. Just shows you what a bit of monopoly muscle can do I guess.

    1. Re:Itanium will crush all... hardly by saha · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Dropping Itanium is a huge blow to HP's pride and I wouldn't be suprised if it completely demoralized their processor design team, which was screwed a few items trying to tango with Intel. Digital (DEC) was screwed by Intel when they showed their designs. HP let their own successful design of the PA-RISC slide, so did SGI MIPS. One can draw parallels how Windows NT would crush all the unixes (unices), instead it was the BSDs and Linux offerings that ended up hurting the unix vendors. I kind of feel bad for SGI for investing much of their time and effort to make the Itanium a key piece of their Linux solution in their Altix line of servers. Time for them to start looking into making AMD 64 boxes. I was at a computer lab the other day and saw a Sun workstation W1100z running Windows XP. Upon closer inspection some of the users where running Solaris and the CPU was a AMD Opteron.

  23. Damn, and I just ordered IA-64 Linux dev. CD.... by necro2607 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yeah.. I just ordered the IA-64 linux developer's kit CD from HP (for free) last week! Jeez..

  24. Re:Low power CPUs? by bungeejumper · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You know, I was speccing out AMD64s too...and I was planning on running AMD64 Gentoo on it too ! The power util was my main concern...till I found a nice page which showed the power consumption of various processors...an AMD64 3200+ runs at 45W idle, 90W peak. The Pentium-M runs ~ 35W peak power. So, the different is only 55 Watts. That's ~ 1 KWHr/day. 30 KWHrs/month. At 12 cents/KWHr, that's 4$ more a month.

  25. Where are OpenVMS user going to go? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    This puts the OpenVMS users into a pickle. HP will stop making Alpha servers. They were planning to migrate the OpenVMS users onto the Itanium servers.
    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=1328 4
    Now that HP will stop making Itanium servers, is HP going to have a migration plan for OpenVMS users to go onto Operton?

    Hopefully this won't kill off OpenVMS, the Operating System that won't die.

  26. That's actually quite sad by gsasha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:That's actually quite sad by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Interesting
      but x86 (and x86-64 as well) is UGLY and laden with all kinds of OLD JUNK

      The old junk is a constant overhead, but processor architectures keep getting bigger and more complex with or without the old junk. Processors are now so large that the old junk is a tiny percentage of the total logic.

      All modern processors translate their user-visible instruction set on-the-fly into some other internal format anyway. The X86 ISA is just a kind of bytecode, and it's a relatively compact one at that. It's easier for compilers to generate than Itanium bytecodes, so it's not hard to see why X86 is still around.

      I kind of doubt that X86 will ever get junked. Now that X86 has 64-bit addressing, there's little reason to create any new user-visible changes to the instruction set. Processors can continue to improve and change their internal architecture without bothering the users with silly implementation details.

    2. Re:That's actually quite sad by roca · · Score: 4, Interesting

      x64's 64-bit mode fixes quite a few of the problems of x86 as well as giving you 64-bit support. For example, a number of useless old instructions are no longer supported (they still work in x86 mode of course). It increases the number of general purpose registers from 8 to 16. Using SSE2 to do floating point, you get a reasonable floating-point instruction set with 16 registers. If you squint a bit it looks like a decent instruction set which just happens to have a weird instruction encoding.

      Yes, the decode stages are a pain (though trace cache helps), but in return you get significantly higher instruction density than competing RISC chips which helps with your instruction cache.

      OTOH the IA-64 architecture was designed around unfounded implementation assumptions like "we won't be doing out-of-order execution". Sorry, WRONG. Sometimes polishing up old junk gives better results than designing completely new and differently broken junk.

    3. Re:That's actually quite sad by JollyFinn · · Score: 2, Informative

      There are FEW minor issues on what you where thinking, comparing itanium to X86:
      Itanium 6 integer units shortpipeline, 3 branchunits, multiple FMAC, smaller CORE size than netburst on equal process. Yes, on same process itanium2 core is smaller than netburst. Biggest block after bus interface and L3 cache on itanium2 are block called IA32 and FP-units. Itanium brings huge execution resources with low die area costs, and then puts huge caches that have redundancy so that MFG costs wouldn't be much worse than celerons mfg costs, while giving HPC performance.
      I had some doubts on itanium until I read the die photo and compared to my knowledge on whats taking die area on x86. When itanium will ditch IA32 hardware compability since these days dynamic translation software is faster than what hardware does and it still gets better. With carefull powermanagement (By no doubt FP takes substantial portion of Itanium2:s powerbudget and ditching IA32 should also free reasources for other use.
      X86 is not just a instruction set its whole set of laws how instructions interact exceptions memory models etc... many tricks for x86 to run fasts are not needed, so IA-64 can be smaller. Now don't put that it some how needs bigger cache. No the software that is run needs certain sized DATA caches no matter the architecture, for a given performance level. Now the itanium looks like a great TARGET for dynamic translation software as SGI has MIPS simulations running much faster than native mips, and Itanium2 x86 compability SOFTWARE layer runs fast too... And in next year itanium will get 512KB L2 Icache so what ever you think for code density problems intel fixes by trowing more cache as a solution...

      Now HP dumping workstations its nothing big. Nearly all Itanium sales where in server side, because the price for workstation level chipsets, especially because of HP pricing policy, of 2X the risc worstation price and 5X the x86 price. 2007 is the year when Itanium either sinks or swims, its year where it will get price parity with xeon, by sharing motherboards and drivers with it...

      --
      Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
  27. Re:Low power CPUs? by hattig · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Of course a 1.4GHz Duron will outperform a 2GHz Celeron P4. See the comparisons on numerous websites that have done the comparison.

    P4 based Celerons on the 400MHz FSB are crippled sad creatures. The latest revision which ups the bus to 533MHz (and the L2 cache? I forget) improves the situation somewhat, but I think they start at 2.8GHz (and being based on the Prescott core, they eat power like a geek drinks Mt.Dew). Celerons are cheap, and they are also cheap. I don't think they provide good value.

    The only thing I agree with is that bleeding edge stuff is a fool's game.

  28. Intel outsider by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Has AMD finally proven that the x86 "standard" can produce truly 100% compatible CPUs, without Intel IP, after decades of doges and ruses, including MMX?

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  29. Try a palmtop processor by megalomang · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  30. In other news, Honda outsells Bentley. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  31. Re:Low power CPUs? by necro2607 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, the linux box may very well save a lot of power compared to the Windows box because it won't occupy your CPU when it's not doing anything.

    As written on the CpuIdle site:

    "Under normal circumstances the CPU isn't always active but spends much time waiting for the keyboard, harddisk or CD-ROM. What would be more logical than to turn off the CPU for that period? That's exactly what the HLT machine instruction (Opcode F4) does.
    ...
    Modern operating systems like Linux execute the HLT instruction in an idle priority thread. This thread is always executed when the CPU is otherwise idle. No additional execution time for HLTing is needed, the CPU will not run slower.

    While other operating systems like Linux always used this mechanism, Windows only learned it with NT. But even with NT and following versions it is only enabled when the BIOS and ACPI implementation is recognized by the OS.    "

    Basically, not only will Linux keep your CPU cooler this way, it will reduce power consumption since the CPU is literally not doing anything when it's "idle".

    I run CpuIdle on my WinXP machine at home and it goes from a normal temp of ~45 degrees Celcius to an average of ~30 degrees, during average desktop usage... Linux will show a similar level of cooling by default. :)

  32. you're not the only one mocking the Itanium... by exhilaration · · Score: 4, Informative

    Check out this article: IBM mocks Itanium server sales - again, make sure you look at their very amusing graph of changing sales forecasts.

  33. TFA? by SuperQ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is it just me, or does the article gloss over the fact that "EM64T" is actual a clone of the AMD64 architecture? Are intel's market-droids trying to brainwash people, or are people really that clueless to the fact that INTEL IS MAKIGN A CLONE OF AN AMD CHIP?

    Give credit where credit is due.. EM64T is clone crap, and is signifigantly slower than the AMD chips.

    1. Re:TFA? by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's not a clone, at lest it's not reverse engineered. Intel has the rights to AMD64 a.k.a. x86-64, because of the old co-manufacturing agreement in the 386 days. The internals will be different, but it has the rights to that ISA and other goodies.

      From What I Remember:
      Intel had difficulties in spitting out enough 386 chips, so they drew up an agreement to co-fab the 386. By the time the 486 came out, Intel figured it could spit out enough 486es themselves. They tried the initial brand differentiation, calling it the i486, and tried to trademark the 'i'. Judge said "you gotta bekidding me, trademark a letter? If I do that, then I only need 25 other ocmpanies to trademark the english language". As an aside, he wasn't that far off, both Zilog and Datsun tried to trademark the letter Z. Anyways, they couldn't, so for the next generation, out comes a made-up trademarkable name, Pentium.

  34. Re:Low power CPUs? by Mateito · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Today's CPUs are overkill for general-usage machines...

    You obviously don't run windows.

    Seriously, you are probably right... but then I use my machine principally as a home entertainment centre, and having a nice fast CPU means I can watch nicely compressed DivX movies (95% of which I own, but DVDs are fragile) with full AC3 5.1 sound without skips.

    A friend of mine recently bough a philips dvp-642 (I think) with DivX playback. It obvious the difference in processing power. He suffers a lot of pixelation and slowdowns when decoding movies.

    --
    Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
  35. Just one little note... by ltwally · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Just one little note that the author of this article fails to mention:

    The Itanium is a high-end workstation/server chip. ONLY. -- While the AMD64 architecture is AMD's entire product line right now. It's their desktop chip; it's their workstation chip; it's their server chip; hell, it's even their notebook/laptop chip.

    Whoever submitted this article seems to think that every AMD64 sold is going to be going into the high-end server market. Either that, or he thinks that home users are buying Itaniums. Funny... I don't seem to recall ever seeing a laptop with an Itanium in it.

    A more honest comparison would be the 800 series Opterons vs. Itaniums, the 200 series Opterons vs. Xeons, and Athlon64's vs. Pentium 4's.

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    /dev/random
    1. Re:Just one little note... by Minna+Kirai · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Just one little note... by Waldmeister · · Score: 2, Interesting


      The Itanium is a high-end workstation/server chip. ONLY.

      If you read older articles from the times when Itanium was still Merced, Intel pretended they wanted to replace the old x86 line with the new IA-64 processors in the long term. The big irons (and workstations) have been only the first step in this plan.

      Would be interesting to know, if Intel still hopes to see this coming true some day, or if they have already buried those hopes completely.

    3. Re:Just one little note... by roca · · Score: 2, Insightful

      AMD64 and Opteron are nearly the same chip and run the same software. AMD gets to share design and manufacturing costs between them. So shipping 10x-100x more AMD64 chips than IA-64 chips means that AMD's costs will be much lower per chip and the chips will be much cheaper. So it really does make sense to compare the volumes of AMD64 vs IA-64.

  36. Re:hp server by rainman_bc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd much rather have IBM servers than HP servers. IMHO IBM does all the little things right, and has IMHO better linux support than HP if you need it.

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  37. Re:Low power CPUs? by hattig · · Score: 2, Informative

    The current Durons run fine on any Socket A motherboard including tasty nForce2 ones. Even so, a cheap Athlon XP or Sempron will also suffice, and they are cheaper than corresponding Celerons. I never read Ars Technica either, and your witty "arse" joke is rather puerile ... especially given that AMD don't pay hardware review sites. Now Intel on the other hand ... THG, AT ...

    The P4 core loves bandwidth. The low cache on the Celeron kills performance. Getting a slower Celeron is okay I suppose, it won't be affected as much. Faster Celerons showed extremely bad scaling, in lots of REAL WORLD benchmarks, not just the artificial ones.

    I suppose that you can't see the difference, you have nothing that needs it. To be fair, doubling the memory in a system is a better investment than another 20% clockspeed though.

    I suppose my point was that for $x, you could get okay performance with Celeron, or good performance with a different processor.

  38. Re:hp server by SillyNickName4me · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > I wish I could afford one of them for my personal web/file server.

    Hmm... while I agree with regards to the quality of those machines, I think that provided you have no problem with fixing your own hardware, for a personal web/file server I'd want some preferably self assembled box made from quality components that I can get at the average computer store.

    Yeah, HP offers decent service for a price, but they really can't beat the 10 mins it takes me to go fix a new disk/mobo/cp/memory, and they really can't compete in price either.

    When running a business this changes entirely unless you for whatever reason need the skills for those things anyway and have the time to spare (ie, get more use out of a required but in time underused tech), whuch is not that likely..

    Still nice toys to have.. but hrm.. for that money I'd rayther have some small AS/400 or such to play with.

  39. I stopped buying Proliants after the merger by HBI · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  40. Workstations != Servers by McSpew · · Score: 2

    Now that HP will stop making Itanium servers...

    Re-read the original post, please. HP is discontinuing Itanium workstations, not servers.

    For all its flaws, Itanium does have more headroom to grow than the x86-64 architecture. The whole reason HP and Intel got into bed over Itanium and its EPIC architecture was because it's getting harder and harder to wring more performance out of a chip by adding parallel instruction pipelines. In order to crank clockspeeds higher, those pipelines have to get longer and longer (witness Prescott's 31-stage pipeline). The more pipelines you have and the longer they are, the worse is the penalty for branch misprediction.

    It's this problem that led HP and Intel to VLIW, where the parallelism is explicitly compiled into the code, reducing or eliminating the need for a lot of transistors that currently break code down into parallel-izable chunks and try to predict branches.

    Unless somebody invents a new way of architecting chips that will eliminate or substantially reduce the branch misprediction penalty without substantially breaking x86 compatibility, Itanium (or something like it) will eventually reign supreme.

    1. Re:Workstations != Servers by roca · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  41. Funny shift in /. mindshare by tji · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Around here, you used to find all kinds of people complaining about the old kludgy x86 architecture and how the backwards compatibility placed terrible limitations on the CPUs and on software that runs on it.

    Now, everyone jumped on the bandwagon spouting "what were they thinking? Trying to define a new architecture.. dumb asses!"

    So, which is it?? I learned architecture and assembly on a Motorola 68k processor. So, the x86 stuff has always seemed kludgy to me. Have the problems been overcome, or do people just not care anymore?

    1. Re:Funny shift in /. mindshare by argent · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "what were they thinking? Trying to define a new architecture.. dumb asses!"

      No, it's "Oh my god, this thing makes CISC look simple, it makes the x86 look streamlined, and hasn't Intel tried the 'lets make the compiler scream in agony' thing a couple of times already?".

      There's also a lot of x86-emulation support, including a whole bunch of special-purpose registers, but hopefully they'll be able to drop that in future versions.

      This time compiler technology may be up to the job of generating good code for it, we'll see.

  42. This is interesting, what's Intel going to do? by Nelson · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I'm not sure how many itaniums have shipped. According the theregister.co.uk, there have been quarters where Dell and IBM shipped 2 and 3 digit quantities of Itanium and Itanium 2 systems. This kind of talks about it.


    Now I was bidding on a dual itanium on ebay a while back, it seemed like a cool piece of exotic hardware with decent performance (my alpha is nearing EOL..;) 40GB of SCSI drive, 2 800Mhz IA64s, 2GB of RAM. I bailed at $800 and it went for $975; original price of the hardware was $12k to $14k. The alarming thing was when I was searching IBM's site for information, it was practically non-existant. I asked some employees to look around inside, it's a real machine the specs are correct, no info because they literally sold under 500 of them.


    There used to be all sorts of Linux on IA64 sites, they've been drying up. People are still doing stuff but it looks like some well backed projects have just dried up. Like the trillian project. Also, it doesn't seem like anybody is making an IA64 linux distribution anymore, there are some projects but all the big boys look like they have one they made back a couple years and never sold it and never updated it, SuSE has an 8. Redhat has a 7 (?!? RH 7? How old is that? Is that even a 21st century release?) and it looks like a RHEL 2.1 which is more reasonable, Mandrake has never been terribly strong off of IA32 but they have an 8.1 which is ancient and, Debian and Gentoo look like that have projects but they are kind of fossilized. I imagine that once the installer is done for most distros, it's mostly just a job of recompiling packages and then some kind of QA effort or a "beta" labeling goes on everything, not to make it sound easy or anything but once it's built it shouldn't require a huge team to maintain. Maybe Intel would kick in a few dollars too, they need Linux for IA64 internally and if they really want to sell the hardware they need some OS for it.


    So Intel has pumped a trmendous amount of money in to IA64, a huge amount of time and they have all but decaired it their future architecture so presumably that leaves them at a bit of a disadvantage should they abandon it. SGI has bet on it. HP has bet on it. It's really down to POWER/PowerPC, x86 and x86-64, and then sort of Sparc. Does Intel keep kicking this dead horse? When does it turn the corner? and how? The next gen chips are all supposed to be socket compatible between the EM64 and IA64, if Intel starts shipping $400 Itaniums then maybe it will start to get some traction but why would you buy one when you can buy an em64 that will run Windows and tons of other software? I don't see how they back out, and I don't see how they can make it win, it looks like AMD has forced their hand and what that really does is make IBM the only contender in enterprise 64bit heavy duty computing right now.

  43. IDC have to revise their 96% mistake by bstadil · · Score: 2, Informative
    Looks like IDC need to revise down their "forecast" again.

    Being that wrong takes talent. Pulling something out of your ass qualifies as precision work compared to this.

    --
    Help fight continental drift.
  44. Re:Low power CPUs? by JamesP · · Score: 2

    http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=21 39&p=7

    For the record, I have a 900MHz Celeron. Those were good processors. Nortwood Celerys just plain suck.

    --
    how long until /. fixes commenting on Chrome?
  45. Ouch! by David+Leppik · · Score: 2, Funny
    HP, has terminated its Itanium workstations.


    Wow. I didn't even know they included self-destruct hardware!
  46. Re:Lets all bash Intel (again) by roca · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.)

  47. Re:Lets all bash Intel (again) by Bateman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Overtaking?

    The Itanium ecosystem is as unhealthy as ever with HP totally dominating sales. HP moved 4,789 of the 5,665 boxes shipped in the second quarter, earning $250m in revenue. That total is roughly equivalent to the RISC server business done by IBM or Sun in one week .

  48. The low hanging fruit was picked decades ago. by flaming-opus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ia-64 is the most dissimilar, but only because everyone else is doing exactly the same stuff. Does the really include any design features not present in some form in ?

    x = a->b->c also stumps hardware pre-loading.

    itanium 2 doesn't do next-line prefetching, but it does read 2 bundles of instructions per cycle. This, depending on the density of those bundles, does everything that a prefetch might do, and more given available execution units.

    Your contention is correct that itanium doesn't solve all the problems that face a modern risc architecture. Does that mean that no one should bother trying? Should processor makers churn out the same stuff and wait for moore's law to make things faster? Hope that multi-core cpus will somehow be better utilized than smps?

    The simple fact of the matter is that there is a finite speed at which one can execute a serial sequence of instructions. One can try to execute pieces of code in parallel, but there is finite parallelism in most codes. Processors have been fighting for ways to minimize the percent of that parallel code that is mistakenly executed serially, but one is bounded by the actual structure of the code.

    Loading data and instructions from memory remains an extremely expensive thing to do, and it's only getting worse. Really solving the problem would require some radical design that completely undermines current methods of programming. I applaud intel for being daring, and the end result is not a disaster, it simply fails to live up to the hype. As a replacement to pa-risc, alpha, and mips, I think itanium is a pretty reasonable choice. As a replacement for x86, not so much.

  49. Snake Oil by turgid · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The itanic has always been snake oil, and some people (and companies) were clever enough to see that last decade when intel was touting it to be the next great thing that would kill RISC processors.

    Luckily for intel, some companies were run by PHBs that didn't have a clue about processor design. In this way, intel managed to kill off development of Alpha (the fastest 64-bit processor in the world), MIPS and PA-RISC. What a way to nail your competition.

    Some people were more forward-thinking and that's why POWER (and PowerPC), UltraSPARC (and SPARC64) and AMD64 survived or came about.

    intel managed to completely and utterly fail to produce something that people wanted. It's expensive, hot, difficult to program, doesn't have an established software base (or operating system), and has lackluster performance on everything except the SPEC floating-point benchmarks. Thus it has found a niche amongst scientists and engineers with more money that sense and very good air-conditioning.

    Over the years, intel and HP have tried very hard to silence the academic and professional itanic dissenters. Alas the PR and FUD machinery couldn't cope (as with all dictatorships) and the empire has crumbled.

    It was really funny (and somewhat sad) when a couple of years back the IT press was talking about "the transition to 64-bit computing" when most people, except intel (actually, including intel, just not with itanic) had done it back in the '90s (DEC, SUN, SGI, Cray (maybe the 80's or 70's), HP).

    Rather than being a radical new architecture, itanic was actually based on theoretical supercomputer designs of the 1970s that were overtaken by developments in RISC processors in the 1980s by IBM, Sun, SGI, DEC, Fujitsu and NEC.

    However, those with the $$$$$$ get to write history, and as I mentioned above, the FUD machine managed to silence many credible critics. Perhaps this will be forgotten. In this case, the market has spoken.

    What really bothers me, is that back in 1988 intel produced an absolutely brilliant processor called the 80860 and it died a death. It was genuinely ahead of its time, Unfortunately, poor marketting and MS-DOS sent it to an early grave.

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    Stick Men