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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."
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.
Isn't x64 the program that runs the VICE C64 emulator? ;-)
Makes me think about their technical vision
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
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!
Top 10 Itanic jokes:
:-D
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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...
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.
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
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!!!!
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.
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!
What the hell were they thinking.
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
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!
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
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.
Yeah.. I just ordered the IA-64 linux developer's kit CD from HP (for free) last week! Jeez..
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Check out this article: IBM mocks Itanium server sales - again, make sure you look at their very amusing graph of changing sales forecasts.
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.
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.
/dev/random
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.
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.
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?
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.)