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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."
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.
Does anyone want a Windows Supercomputer anyway? Does Microsoft really think they have a chance in this sector considering how entrenched *nix is?
No it wasn't. Intel developed to itanic as a "post-RISC" design to crush all the 64-bir RISC processors, and to take over the workstation and server market. It was designed to be _the_ volume 64-bit processor with spectacular performance and low price due to economies of scale.
Those of us with a passing interest in microprocessors knew it was a turkey.
The only thing itanic has going for it is high SPEC FP scores. On everything else it is either poor or mediocre. It is hot, power-hungry, expensive, have virtually no software support, no developer community etc.
If you look closely at the "benchmark" comparisons that HP and intel put out for public consumption, you will see they usually only compare with very old models from competitors. Also notice the kind of workloads they compare and the configuration of the machines.
SGI recently might have given NASA a free itanic supercomputer if the rumours are true, accounting for a whole 10% of this years itanic shipments. That sounds like a processor in trouble.
Itanic was a solution looking for a problem. It was based on out-dated ideas of processr design, it was late, over-engineered and basically a damp squib for all but the handful of people who can afford it for numbercrunching. This is a far cry from the de-facto 64-bit, mass-market, low-cost processor with world domination that intel intended for it to be.
Stick Men
Pentium Pro, another hyped up CPU that never really delivered.
Hang on, you are joking, right?
PPro has probably been Intel's best chip architecture to date. The initial P6 had bad 16bit performance, which made it a bad choice for consumers are that time, but it was very competitive in normal 32bit mode, idea for NT, Linux and other PC Unixen. The 2nd iteration of the P6 architecture fixed the 16bit issue and was enormously successful. The latest iteration of that arch (Pentium-M) is quietly outperforming the architecture designed to replace it, the P4, at nearly half the clock speed and far less power usage. Indeed, it looks like Intel will be going *back* to the P6 family in future as its 'frontline' PC architecture.
So you must be joking.
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The only thing itanic has going for it is high SPEC FP scores. On everything else it is either poor or mediocre.
I have to second that. My feeling on it is when they had a meeting with a blank piece of paper to design this chip they only invited hardware people. All the tough stuff has been moved into software.
I think the lack of out of order execution really hirts them. If you don't do an amazing job with the compiler then the processor moves like a slug. In the supercomputer centre I used to use they "upgraded" their 512 processor MIPS machine by adding a 400 processor (or so) Itanic box. For a lot of things without extra optimization of the source code (i.e. just compìling the thing, assuming you could get it to compile, but that is another story) the Itaniums were SLOWER than the 3 year old MIPS processors. It takes a lot of tweaking to get anything like peak performance
There are 3 FPU pipleines that you have to fill at compile time to get maximum performace out of the thing. Identifying THREE parallel instructions at compile time, ALL THE TIME, is damn hard, and normally the compilers fail. Hence slow.
It is just too hard to get anything like the theoretical peak performance out of the thing for stuff other than benchmarks.
Linus was right, then, I guess...
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
The initial P6 had bad 16bit performance, which made it a bad choice for consumers are that time, but it was very competitive in normal 32bit mode, idea for NT, Linux and other PC Unixen. The 2nd iteration of the P6 architecture fixed the 16bit issue and was enormously successful.
Sorry, wrong on the 16bit issue. The 2nd iteration of the P6 architecture, aka Pentium III, still sucked with 16 bit software. It was saved by the introduction of 32bit software and a (mostly) 32 bit OS.
I remember a software project I was working on in 1998, where we still used Delphi 1 (16bit) because the customer still had a Win3.11 environment.
When we ran that program side-by-side on a Pentium MMX with 200MHz and a Pentium III with 450 MHz, the old Pentium MMX was roughly twice as fast.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Itanium cpu limit: 512 cpus.
SGI is being very successfull with it's 512 itanium machines running Linux.
Note that SGI are doing this with very very special hardware. IIRC each CPU brick in an Origin has 4 itanics. All these bricks are then interconnected with very very special CPU interconnect routers.
That these machines go to 512 CPUs has *nothing* to do with the CPUs being Itanic, it's all down to the ccNUMA interconnect technology (which SGI initially acquired from Cray). If you need further convincing of this, note that the Origin 3k architecture SGIs machines have essentially the same architecture, but use MIPS CPUs. This architecture could be applied to Opteron too, and probably with less effort, as Opteron natively supports ccNUMA and comes with CPU networking built-in.
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