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Microsoft Dropping Itanium Support For Clusters
upsidedown_duck writes "According to an article at TheStreet.com, Microsoft is opting not to support Itanium on its coming release of Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition. Instead, Microsoft will focus on AMD's offerings and Xeon."
One really has to wonder how long intel is going to stick with the itanium after its dissapointing sales figures and a move like this from the software giant is sure to really hurt. Maybe they will eventually drop their itanium line in favour of a AMD type X86-64 instruction set like they are using in their new P4's and new Xeons.
This is actually an exciting opertunity for AMD since they can increase their margin in the sever and business arena where the big money is. They should seize this opportunity and start pushing their server lines.
Siemens and Bull (both major vendors in Europe), Dell, and IBM, and probably a lot more that I'm forgetting support ia64.
Actually pretty much every hardware vendor (that's traditionally worked with Intel CPUs) supports ia64 in one way or another.
But this article isn't a surprise. ia64 is just presently a pretty crappy CPU for clustered computing because it's very hot, sucks a lot of power and very expensive. When building a large cluster you naturally have to balance heat, energy and cost against performance much more than you do with most setups.
HP are dropping them from their high-end workstations.
Not their high-end servers.
...an Englishman in London.
Monday Forbes reports Intel told software companies they should license a multi-core chip as one processor. Also on Monday, Intel compared their new Itanium to the "best published RISC" machine. Their graph indicates a 64-processor Itanium is about the same SpecIntRate as a 64-processor RISC machine. Now the funny part is for the RISC result they used the 32 chip Power5 SpecIntRate as 64-processors. So 64 Itanium-2 chips are really about the same as 32 Power-5 chips. So while Intel advocates per-chip licensing, they use per-core benchmarking. It is also interesting to note that this new Itanium-2 SpecIntBase of 1590 is just a bit faster than a 2 Ghz Pentium-M and much slower than a 2.6 Ghz Athlon-64-FX.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If Intel would come up with a replacemenet architecture for the x86 that was a credible alternative, they could do it.
Here's what they've tried so far:
iAPX432: arguably the CISC of CISCs. Out-VAXED the VAX, the only instruction set more complex was one of the Japanese TRON designs.
i960: this one had a chance, it was a fairly conventional RISC with good performance, but it was too early. Intel was still enamored with the x86 architecture, and it got stripped of its MMU and shunted into embedded systems lest it compete with the x86.
i860: Baroque RISC variant that forced the compiler to do an incredible amount of work to get decent performance. Kind of a trial balloon for the IA64.
IA64: Even more baroque RISC/VLIW blend, instructions are basically RISC-like, but bundled together in wide instructions. Again, the compiler has to be insanely great. There are some insanely great compilers for it now, we'll see...
XScale: take the DEC StrongARM and give it the Intel touch: long pipelines, heavy dependency on the compiler, the 400 MHz XScale was not a lot faster than the 206 MHz StrongARM. It's still got a shot of taking market share away from x86 at the low end, except that other companies like VIA and Transmeta are waiting to take that on if Intel really starts trying to push.
If they really wanted to wean themselves from the x86 they'd have kept the Alpha EV8 team working on the Alpha, release it as the Intel AXP Architecture, and pretty soon people will forget that it's not their design.
I don't think Intel's managers really want to wean the company from the x86. They say they do, and may believe it, but their actions don't show it.
> Hmm.. they had alot of help from the alpha
> design they bought.. however, they managed to
> cripple it beyond recognition....
The Itanium and its grandparents at HP were already in production by the time HP bought Compaq (which had previously bought DEC, the creator of the Alpha). HP did reassign many Alpha engineers to Itanium work, but that was widely believed to be a move to no-compete-prevent them from going to Fujitsu and continuing their work on Alpha.
sPh
Actually... the Alpha's design philosophy lived on in the Pentium 4 - higher clock speeds.
The Alpha's approach was simple ISA and high clock speeds. The initial versions didn't even have OOOE or byte addressing. It was the "RISCiest of the RISC". It wasn't until later versions when byte addressing and OOOE were added. The Alpha was a fine chip.
The competitor was the HP PA-RISC line which followed the lower clock speed but lots of execution units design philosophy (sound familiar to the AMD lines?) They found it very difficult to ramp up clock speed and very difficult to add more functional units (it's an x^^2 problem) so it stagnated pretty fast. Initially, the two CPU lines were similar in performance but the Alpha ran off from it readily.
Alphas were designed to be simple and high clock speed first, then add the complex stuff.
Alphas lack of volume was partly because instead of bin sorting the wafer, cores on the wafers were tested to see how fast they would run and sold as such. The high speed parts were only found a couple/few times per wafer so they were rare. In addition, this type of testing is very expensive in terms of time and resources to do (bin sorting is much cheaper) and also kept the cost of the CPUs very high for the time.
Not all that well, MIPS Technolgoies was loss making for a while, it revenues for the last quarter were only $14.6m, whereas ARM's revenues were $70m, and ARM has a higher operating margin despite exchange rate movements going against it. Further more it looks as though they are going to lose share in the games console market, and possibly some others. My point is that they are a player but they are not doing very well given the size of the market.