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Why Doesn't the Itanium Get the Respect It's Due?
happycorp wonders: "As in recent years the Itanium does well, easily beating x86 processors even at its low clockspeed (1.4Ghz). The supercomputer people are serious about benchmarking (no easily tricked microbenchmarks or reliance on closed-source
commercial apps), so the discrepancy between the performance and perception of this chip is serious.
With a single-CPU Itanium2 system at
around $2000 their price is already reasonable, and the price would come down
(and software would be ported) if the Itanium ever became a mass market chip. Having an affordable chip one step above a Xeon or Opteron in floating-point performance would not be such a bad thing for gaming enthusiasts (or 3D artists). So, the recent
article
on the
Top 500 supercomputers list brings up a question I've been meaning to ask:
Why do we see so many disparaging opinions of the Itanium processor (all those 'Itanic' jokes, etc.)?"
"It seems computing enthusiasts' sentiment is set against this processor, and its likely that it's going to be abandoned sooner or later. We'll be paying for x86 compatibility indefinitely (recall the Xeon has roughly
three times the number of transistors of the ppc970 for example; but we hardly get three times the performance).
These are a couple scores from the top 20, with the total gigaflops divided by the number of processors to obtain a per-processor speed:
rank processor ghz (gflops / #procs) speed #5 ppc970 2.2 (27910 / 4800) 5.81 #7 itanium2 1.4 (19940 / 4096) 4.86 #10 opteron 2.0 (15250 / 5000) 3.05 #20 xeon 3.06 (9819 / 2500) 3.92
Given this, consider what a 2 or 3 Ghz Itanium could do.
(fine print: I am not affiliated with the Itanium or the top500 list in any way)."
These are a couple scores from the top 20, with the total gigaflops divided by the number of processors to obtain a per-processor speed:
rank processor ghz (gflops / #procs) speed #5 ppc970 2.2 (27910 / 4800) 5.81 #7 itanium2 1.4 (19940 / 4096) 4.86 #10 opteron 2.0 (15250 / 5000) 3.05 #20 xeon 3.06 (9819 / 2500) 3.92
Given this, consider what a 2 or 3 Ghz Itanium could do.
(fine print: I am not affiliated with the Itanium or the top500 list in any way)."
Because Intel tried to force everyone to jump on the 64bit bandwagon at once, while windows didn't even support it yet, without backwork compatibility to existing 32bit software. It's a good design, just doesn't (didn't ?) fit well with the mass market at the time of the release.
I think the big problem is that it cannot run x86 software very quickly. Most software that people want to run in the mass market is precompiled, binary x86 software. That stuff just does not run well on the Itanic. That, combined with the fact that the mass market still doesn't really benefit from a 64-bit address space means that the Itanium was a more expensive, slower processor. It's no wonder that it didn't sell.
Early versions also had problems with heat. Where I work we have some Itanic workstations and in the winter, if we were chilly, we literally turned them on to help warm up our offices.
Hundreds and hundreds of products have been killed or permanently crippled because their first versions were terrible. Itanium is the same thing. With the public perception of the Itanium still the same as it was for the first (pathetic) iteration of it, how are you going to convince your manager to spend the money to get it? Benchmarks only go so far.
-Daniel
Its easier to harness the power of many horses than grow one 100 times as powerful.
No, it is easier to grow 100 horses than one horse 100 times as powerful, and yet we've gone ahead and done it anyway, because, in point of fact, it is easier to harness and control one horse than 100.
See The Wheel of Reincarnation.
KFG
You have floating-point listed there, which is great for science I'm sure, but where are the integer numbers?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Let me tell y'all a little story.
Back in '94-'95 i was doing the third grade of the Computer Science course at the Royal Institute of Technology, which meant I had to choose a specialization. I chose "Computer Systems", ie. processors, busses, caches and what-not.
This was a very exiting time to be studying processors since (for a fleeting moment) Intel processors where the absolutely worst processors among the serious combatants.
Yes, you read that right. The Alpha was (of course) and unstoppable juggernaut, but through a freak act of development schedules the new MIPS had managed to outstrip the latest Alpha.
After MIPS and Alpha we had PA-RISC, SPARC, PPC and then finally the pathetic, lowly Intel x86.
Alpha had strong plans of totatlly replacing the x86 by offering Alpha based x86 emulations that were faster than the fastest x86 in running x86 code.
But now, Intel announced the Itanium.
Apparently, all the CPU makers sat down and discussed this, and agreed that "They may be last right now, but they have piles of cash. They could do this. They really could."
So, what did the competiton do?
Because of aquisitions, they also happened to be saddled with the best processor ever made, the Alpha.
Stick with dying Intel... Develop best processor. Hmm...
Well, you all know where HP is going.
And then what happend?
Intel didn't deliver... and didn't deliver... and didn't deliver some more.
Year after year passes...
When the Itanium was finally delivered, it was obvious that every other platform could have kept up, if they would just have kept developing their processors!
But they didn't and now they sleep with the fishes.
Conclusion: By making their Itanium announcement, Intel slew four out five serious competitor. It doesn't relly matter if the Itanium sucks. In fact, the Itanium would be Intels greatest success even if they had never delivered it.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Memory was our bottleneck. More ram equals more speed.
Don't blame Itanium that you picked the wrong chip for your needs. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation could have saved you a lot of money. With your 70 gb database and 2 gb of ram, assuming there wasn't much locality in the lookups you have about a 2.85% chance that your next lookup is already in memory. Up it to 12 gb and you have 17.14% - still not much, so either way your main bottleneck is going to be the bandwidth of your memory system. There was no secret that the first batch of Itaniums used 133 MHz RAM while DDR ram for x86 was up to 266 or maybe even 333 MHz by that time. Itanium's niche has always been floating-point intensive applications, which yours was not.
For great justice.
I have to concur. System and memory bandwidth are often overlooked when designing a system.
:P"
"It's got 2 xeons and 4 GB of ram!
It sounds great to management.
As my colleague noted above, db operations are IO bound. This means you have to get data from point a to point b very quickly, whether from memory or disk.
To do that job you need high memory and system bus clock speeds, so there is no vaccuum happening at the cpu in.
There is a point of diminishing returns with adding memory. Sometimes adding too much memory can slow things down, considerably.
The CAS latency increases as does the latency due to memory management overhead.
With a db you face the same exact issue that professional audio engineers do. Getting lots of data to the cpu, and back out somewhere.
Anecdote:
my buddy, a pro dj, got a dual xeon 2.4 Ghz (I think it was) 4GB memory for producing music. at around 47 audio streams, snap crackle pop. cpu usage was around 10% or so. It was a 12000 dollar mistake on his part.
I walked in with a $700 amd 64 3200+ (thats 2Ghz) with 1/4 of the memory, one cpu, and I loaded up a project with 134 audio streams and it played like butter.
Both were running windows xp 32, both were running Steinberg Cubase SX.
Xeon specs:
FSB 533
DDR 133 on 4 1GB sticks
AMD 64 spec:
FSB 800
DDR 400 on 1 1GB stick
Read the specs for VIA K8T800 chipset and compare it to any Xeon chipset. This time period was a year ago Christmas. Read up on how the memory architecture works for both CPU's.
Database tests were similar. Just about any IO bound process will produce a similar result. Music, video, db, etc.
It isn't that the xeon sucks, it's a computations per second centric architecture. Unfortunately for intel, they focused on clock speed when they should have been removing architecture bottlenecks which would allow people to take advantage of all those cycles. The G5 has similar issues but not as bad.
It's all about the memory and bus architecture... The sad uninformed people say (pinch airflow from nose so you sound geeky) "It's a 64 bit processor, you need a 64 bit OS to take advantage of it, period".
What they fail to realize is the 64 bit memory and bus architecture happen *below the HAL*. the OS doesn't even see it, let alone need to be 64 bit to take advantage of it. I politely let them flap their gums and went out and bought one anyway, then proved them wrong.
Computationally = intel, tho that gap is narrowing
IO = AMD64 or opteron.
I don't care if you are running windows 95, amd64 will be faster for IO bound stuff, than any 32 bit architecture is capable of even getting close to.
If you are crunching spreadsheets, word processing or videogaming, *generally*, intel is better, tho that gap is getting smaller. It will likely disappear when 64 bit OS's get apps caught up to them.
For DB, working with large files, shunting lots of streams around the mobo, AMD 64 *smokes* intel 32 right now, 32 bit apps notwithstanding. There is simply no contest.
l8,
AC