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)."

Comments

Did I miss something?

[Rei]

Who is going to buy a 2,000$+ graphics card to play games?