IBM to Drop Itanium

Hack Jandy writes "Xbitlabs is reporting that IBM chose not to persue Itanium in their next generation server lineup because of the "market acceptance issues" of the platform. They will still continue with new revisions of Xeon servers, however. With IBM's investments in Power, I can't help but think the writing was already on the wall. The article also hints that IBM might start using Power in their high end server products."

Comments

Stick a fork in it, it's done

[drinkypoo]

No one outside of certain specialized environments that demand loads of floating point is interested in itanic. Flush the damn thing already and work on EM64T, will you intel?

WTF does "The article also hints that IBM might start using Power in their high end server products" mean anyway? The processor is called POWER, and IBM already uses it in their high-end server products, like the ones that used to be called RS/6000. As for Power, well, show me a transistor that works without it.

I'll miss it

[m50d]

Say what you like, but Itanium was a nice architecture. The compiler is the proper place for the optimisations, the processor should be left to do the actual processing. It's still the most efficient way I know to do raytracing or anything multimediay, and I predict there will still be a market for them for some time.

On second thought, maybe they'll start appearing cheaply on ebay. That'd be nice.

Re:I'll miss it

[Schweg]

With Itanium, Intel attempted to tackle a set of issues that isn't new, and other companies have tried (and failed at) before. It's hard to shift almost all of the burden of optimization, because it's a case of "early optimization" (the root of all evil). Optimization by the processor at run-time allows one to deal with data-dependent issues, and base decisions on statistics gathered by modern processors (such as branch history, caching behavior, etc). Intel made a good try at it, but ended up making a very power-hungry processor that exposed a lot of complexity to the programmer, and whose advantages compared to other processors on the market were not very clear.

Re:I'll miss it

[Waffle Iron]

The compiler is the proper place for the optimisations, the processor should be left to do the actual processing.

On the contrary, the compiler has no insight into the actual run-time behavior of the current dataset, and compiler development can lag updates in CPU features by many years.

Nobody knows how to optimize for the exact version of the CPU that a program is being run on than the CPU itself.

Re:I'll miss it

[johannesg]

because it's a case of "early optimization" (the root of all evil)

While you may very well be right on this issue, it is taking this quote very much out of context. Early optimization in software is bad because it tends to reduce maintainability and wastes effort on code that is likely not performance critical anyway. In contrast, the need for maintainability in compiler-generated assembly is questionable, and it doesn't really matter if the compiler spends some extra time optimizing every last statement even if it is non-critical; unless you are on unbelievably large projects it just doesn't matter. What I'm trying to say is, the quote you provided doesn't apply here.

Sorry for ranting, but I can't stand it when people take these kinds of "common wisdoms" and then display a complete lack of understanding of the actual issues behind them...

Re:I'll miss it

[dvdeug]

The compiler is the proper place for the optimisations, the processor should be left to do the actual processing.

The theory behind the highly-touted JIT optimizations for the JVM is that it's often better to optimize at run-time, when you know the data, then at compile time when you don't. And compilers don't usually have even the minimal knowledge the programmers have about which switches will be taken.

Intel's iAPX432 should have warned it about depending too much on the compiler. The iAPX432, the replacement for the 80286, was an intrepit chip of unique design that was sunk, in part, by a lack of compilers that could create compentent code for it. The benchmark compiler would always use the 700-cycle procedure call instead the cheaper, more specialized procedure calls available, for example.

And what happens when the underlying chip changes? You optimize for a Pentium in very different ways than for an i386 or a Pentium III, especially in the ordering that the Itanium wanted to shove to the compiler. If we wanted to recompile our code for every new chip, the x86 series would long be dead.

Cell ?

[polyp2000]

lets face it when Cell arrives formally theres going to be little point in ploughing resources into something thats effectively headed for obsolesence

Re:Getting leaner, IBM?

[goMac2500]

Even as a POWER supporter, I find it hard to say it will be accepted as a viable alternative to the PC platform. POWER has existed since 1994 and its failed to make a huge dent in x86, even though it has always been much faster.

AMD64

[bstadil]

work on EM64T, will you intel?

baloney, call it by its proper name AMD64

IBM's High end

[MagnusDredd]

Article has some strange ideas about what constitutes a High-end server. I'd imagine a IBM P595 which supports up to 64 Processors would be high end... IBM seems to think so too. But then again what do they know about high end. I mean, they are only #2 in the High end server market (over $1,000,000 per server), and #1 in the mid-range server market (between $100,00 and $,1,00,000 per server).

Power vs Itanium vs Xeon vs Opteron

[SpamMonkey]

Ok, so we all know the various CPU names and who makes them etc but do we actually know how they compare? Me and the team I work for have total ownership of 7 SAP Application servers and 1 database server, total ram in the DB server is 48GB and the App servers have been 4 and 12GB's each (normal compared to batch processing). They're all running on either IBM P630 to P670's. What does that mean? I have NO idea except that they are able to comfortable deal with 1200 active users at any given time.

now, if someone can tell me that Itanium will give us better performance for more we'll look into it, if it's Xeon then it's Xeon (pah but you get the idea). What I fail to see is why it's important what hardware is being used as long as it does the job it needs to do!

Thanks.

Re:Getting leaner, IBM?

[jbplou]

POWER is not going to be accepted as a viable alternative to the PC platform. It is as likely as Debian being accepted by the general business world as a viable alternative Windows

Re:Getting leaner, IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the reason that Power(PC) never made a dent in x86 is that IBM promised everyone that it would scale better and it simply did not. Furthermore, IBM themselves quashed cheap PowerPC workstations due to internal politics surrounding OS/2, never provided good chipsets to third parties, etc.

Hey "Blame Microsoft For Everything" is fun, but IBM never seriously attempted to position PowerPC in the mainstream x86 market.

They could have been popular

[extra the woos]

If Intel released them at a low price and with desktop motherboards that were affordable. If an average geek could build the latest itanium system for $200 more than the latest athlon system, well, people would buy it because it's something different, it performs well, and because they want to mess with the architecture. It shuld have been marketed like the P-Pro. Too much for the desktop user, but if you want one you can afford it and you can build it/buy it!

Visionary

[SunFan]

Whoever said that the ISAs would condense down to only x86, PowerPC, and SPARC appears to have been correct. Alpha is gone, mostly. MIPS is gone in the desktop/server, mostly. Itanium kinda came and went, it appears. PA-RISC is still popular...but but HP wanted Itanium.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why Itanium Failed

[bani]

what happened with itanium is intel made a number of huge gambles on technology.

in order for itanium to be successful, every single one of them had to pan out.

what happened is virtually none of them panned out.

intel blew their load on a high risk gamble, and lost. they still can't quite come to grips with the fact and are still sinking billions of dollars into a doomed architecture -- despite the fact that just about every original itanium partner has already given up on it (err.. "jumped ship", hence the itanic joke)

intel has been beating on itanium for nearly a decade and it still hasn't lived up to a single design goal.

and before the itanium defenders go "no, itanium was only ever intended for rackmount servers", that is 100% contrary to intel's own marketing literature which states that "workstation" is one of the target markets of the itanium.