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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."
Aww, you know the rest.
SGI and HP are the only ones left on the Itanic. HP looks to be hesitant anymore though, hell it plopped a fuckton of its own money on IA64 dev and just recently killed off its IA64 Workstations. One of the few places that Itanium sold fairly well.
Sun might bring solaris to it, but... why?
IA64 is a really cool chip (no pun intended) and I hate to see it flounder like this, but with PPC, x86, and SPARC all stepping up with new R&D.... Who needs itainium?
(oh and the nasa cluster based on it is neato)
I hope you die painfully and alone.
The only place I see the Itaniums making it anywhere is SGI. They're using them for all their supercomputers running linux. Let's hope they keep the mips line... just in case ;)
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Does Microsoft's dropping of the Itanium from it's supported platform list herald the end of Itanium? No. In fact, Microsoft wasn't even the first to drop it, rather HP was the first to go ahead and stop using it in its high end servers. The whole thing boils down to the cost/benefit ratio which is insanely high for Itanium-based machines.
So Intel now gets a boost to its Xeon line of chips which are leading the high-performance server market percentage-wise. With this, Intel can put more effort into ramping Xeon production and subsequently driving the prices down there, and likewise continue producing the superfast Itaniums in servers running Linux or some other proprietary supercomputer operating system.
The demand for supercomputers is low. It will always be low. As technology progresses, the normal users like us get to reap the rewards of this high technology and eventually those supercomputers will be available to us on a single board. The supercomputers of that future will be supersupercomputers and the demand will still be small.
So let the Itanium fit its niche in the super-highend market. Let the Xeons fill in the normal server market. And let Microsoft stay out of the supercomputer market where it simply doesn't fit.
This is a smart move. The Itanium was built for a niche market. Due to it's high price, and low performance to price ratio, the Itanium isn't popular. But Microsoft has so much weight that it could probably stop supporting intel processors and still come out alive, albeit heavily damaged. If I were Microsoft, I'd try to buy (or merge) with AMD or Intel, then stop OS support for my competitor, leaving them helpless. It would be risky, but if I were a selfish, inconsiderate, greedy, power-hungry, monopoly driven CEO, that's what I would do :).
Itanium is too small a market for Microsoft to devote developer time to. They're better off getting longhorn ready than supporting an already dead platform. Itantium will go the way of the Pentium Pro, another hyped up CPU that never really delivered.
Seems like the Wintel alliance isn't so strong these days. Microsoft opting for IBM's PPC processor for XBox 2 is another example of how they're looking what hardware is best for the job, instead of what their traditional partners can offer.
Does anyone want a Windows Supercomputer anyway? Does Microsoft really think they have a chance in this sector considering how entrenched *nix is?
Dammit, I can't blame MS for this move.
As much as we all like MS-bashing, this action does not seem evil.
Or, is it? (Please?)
Has anybody just bought a big Itanium-cluster to run Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition on it?
BTW, is the name really "Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition"? Sounds terrible...
I don't need a signature.
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.
The Pentium Pro never really delivered? In it's various incarnations (Pentium Pro, Pentium 2, Pentium 3)have been around for a while...
:)
But anyway, this is news how? I wasn't aware that there were enough Itanics around to MAKE into a cluster
Linus was right, then, I guess...
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
In a way, this shows us the limits of closed source developpement :
.NET for it's OSes. But until then, they are tied to Intel x86, and can make some exceptions a few times...
Compagnies have to concentrate their (limited) efforts on a few software/platform combinations. They cannot developpe a version for every CPU existing on this planet.
Microsoft has already a lot of work to do (Longhorn, 64bits XP, XP reloader, still supporting deprecated Win98, developing specials like WinCE, WinMedia, etc...) so they just cannot afford supporting more than 2 CPU types.
In open source, it's the opposite. Because the source is Open, even if the main developper can only target 1 CPU type, everyone is free to try to recompile/port the code to another architecture.
Just have a look at the impressive number of architectures supported by Linux (including weird platforms like cellphones, gaming console [DreamCast/XBOX/GameCube] ).
Maybe this trends will change if Microsoft finds a way to use "write once run everywhere" vm like
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Wonder how this will affect the market. /. land? Does the big M$ gorilla's 'endorsement', Sun's decision to use opteron in their low end servers, AMD technical superiority, Intel's seeming 'mis-steps', the overall market upswing, the fact that A64 is a NICE piece of hardware, that AMD is NOT intel, and make AMD a very attractive investment?
/.'ers who invest are planning to react to this Intel news.
AMD 2 year chart.
I bought a little bit back when the Athlon 64 was announced. Trading volume has been up since. Opteron announcement didn't seem to make much of an impression on the market.
Post election, the markets been up overall.
Do you think we'll see a runup to $30 over the next couple of days?
Now I'm feeling like I should have bought a bit more AMD but historically I've been bitten on almost every investment decision based on the techniclal merits of the product.
WHat's the feeling out there in
Whay about AMD taking on $600,000,000 debt the other day and adding a guy from Radio Shack (see latest SEC filing).
My favorite way of looking at stocks (useless for decisions as I still don't grok it) is the correlation between the analyst recommendations and price/volume.
What sort of analysis do these guys do? Ouija board?
BUT wait. What I really want to know is how you
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14310
(the link to the video is at the end).
I think we all know EPIC is dead. So is Moore's law.
Get used to learning how to parallelize (??) your
program.
Itanic I knew it not at all. Lot's of 64 bit CPU's out there means we can (finally) write nice emulators for the 36 bit ones (grins)
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.
Now we cannot imagine a bewolf cluster of these...
Pfff!!!
how long until
... it just smells that way ; but hey, why don't HP take it out of its coffin, Intels starts printing 'Alphanium inside' labels, and here we go again !!!
Change the record.
x86 has come a long way over the years. We now have a multitude of streaming SIMD instructions and the biggest complaint of x86, the lack of GPRs, has been remedied by AMD in x86-64. It's cheap, relatively easy to code for and is not going away any time soon.
And you say x86 is power hungry? What does that make Itanic?
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
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.
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"Itanium" and "Windows Cluster Edition"!
It's like saying "Bum Rashes announce they won't support haemmorhoids"...
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.
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.
By "Power970" you seem to be referring to the PowerPC family. Don't forget that this chip family is based on the Power architecture from IBM (with some help from Apple and Motorola). The Power architecture contains other chips too, some of which don't have the limitations you cite. Certainly the chip architecture is fully capable of supporting machines with a larger number of CPUs running a single system image.
Although the really big (and custom) Blue Gene systems are apparently clusters, there isn't anything about the IBM Power Architecture itself that would prevent large monolithic systems from being designed and built.
The SPARC architecture can be used for machines like this, too. (Remember the CM-5?).
Building a supercomputer with a large number of CPUs running a single system image is a unique task with a limited client base, and SGI has experience with that. A whole lot more than CPU choice goes into making it work. The way they tell it it was quite a rush. The internal conversation must have gone something like this: "OK, team, we're going to build exactly one of these, and we already decided the price!" NASA doesn't build rockets like that, but SGI can build supercomputers like that. Impressive.
SGI deserves kudos. But if we step back and look at the big picture from the vantage point of SGI, it sure looks like SGI chose the IA-64 CPU for marketing reasons, not technical reasons. I'd have to guess that their engineering tasks would have been made easier by using a CPU that draws less power, for example. They've been on the ropes for years and conventional wisdom says to back Intel if you're in trouble because that's the safe bet for marketing. Why this remains conventional wisdom when the track record clearly shows that UNIX vendors who switch to Intel are cut up and fed to other UNIX vendors, is another topic.
You're right of course, that there are two different classes of super computers on the Top 500 list, with one class based on the cluster concept, and the other based on the concept of a single system image. Clusters are radically less expensive, and monoliths are better at certain computing tasks, and it's hard to compare them.
Monoliths often get custom case mods, though, and thus tend to look cooler. Who would hang a poster of a beowulf cluster of generic beige 1U rackmounts on their office wall? Everybody wants a poster of a Cray or a CM-5 or a Mach 5...
Hey! I just realized monoliths don't seem to look as cool as clusters lately. What's up with that?!
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. -- Albert Einstein
At least better features of the Alpha design were cribbed into PIII and PIV designs...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."