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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)."
They should have called it the "Dangerfield".
The chipmaker has released two new Itaniums for two-processor servers as part of its effort to eliminate price premiums on the chip.
Intel announced on Monday two new Itanium processors for two-processor servers, another step in the company's efforts to eliminate price as a barrier to Itanium acceptance.
The 1.4GHz Itanium 2 with 3MB of cache is designed for servers in clusters. The new chip will provide about 25 percent more performance and cost much less than the initial Itanium optimised for clusters, which came out last year, said Jason Waxman, director of multiprocessor platform marketing at Intel.
The second new chip, a 1.6GHz Itanium 2 with 3MB of cache, is optimised for higher performance in general-use two-processor servers, he said.
Waxman reiterated that Intel is working on several technologies that will eliminate any price premium on Itanium by 2007 and thereby allow its performance advantages to, hopefully, blossom.
"The price/performance balance will be heavily in favour of Itanium," Waxman said.
With the focus on price, the Itanium melodrama is once again reaching a turning point. After several years of delays, the chip family debuted in 2001 to poor reviews and negligible customer acceptance. A second version of the chip that appeared in 2002 dramatically improved performance but failed to spark the market.
Itanium finally began to gain acceptance in 2003 with Madison, a new version of Itanium 2 that substantially improved performance again and lowered the cost. Intel shipped about 100,000 Itaniums in 2003, compared with only around a few thousand for the first two years. Itanium volume is expected to double this year, chief executive Craig Barrett said in February.
But in 2004, Intel announced that it would come out with a version of its Xeon chip that runs both 32- and 64-bit code. Xeon and Pentium chips typically run 32-bit code. Itanium runs 64-bit code, which, among other advantages, lets a computer maker pack far more memory into a computer.
Itanium, however, requires completely different software to work well, a factor that has hindered adoption. Part of the appeal of the Opteron chip is that it can handle larger memory loads in 64-bit mode on essentially the same software base.
Lowering the cost of Itanium servers won't eliminate the software issue, but it will begin to create an environment in which greater acceptance could occur, which in turn could cause software developers to gravitate to Itanium. Analysts and PC makers have viewed this theory with various doses of scepticism, but the range of opinion is generally substantially less negative than it was 18 months ago.
Price drops have already had some effect. In 2002, a two-processor Itanium server cost about $18,000 (£9,859). With the new chips, a similarly configured system can sell for less than $8,000, while basic one-processor Itanium servers will go for just more than $2,000.
Some of these price cuts have come as a result of Moore's Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months. But Intel has also expanded its product line to better suit the economic realities of two-processor servers. The company also designs and partly manufacturers many of the Itanium servers on the market, which cuts independent engineering costs.
To lower the price further, Intel will begin to create products and add features to Itanium so that Itanium servers can be made out of many of the same components as Xeon servers. In 2005 and 2006, Itanium servers will be able to use the same memory or other components of Xeon servers, Waxman said.
In 2005, Intel will also come out with two different chipsets for Montecito, the next major version of the chip. One chipset will wring maximum performance out of the chip, Waxman said, while the other will allow server makers to insert Montecito into their Madison-based servers, thereby cutting down independent design efforts.
By 2007, Intel will
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.
the dead ones were always much better :)
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
I have certainly noticed a general move away from Intel in the past few years. I think they may have had a run of bad press and serious competition from other manufacturers lately.
They just aren't the juggernaut they used to be. There was a time when they built it and people came. I presume choice is what's keeping the sales down.
Why do we see so many disparaging opinions of the Itanium processor (all those 'Itanic' jokes, etc.)?
Because people repeat what they hear. Many people here only know what has been said on Slashdot about the Itanium. They've never used one. MrDicker64 said it was crap, so it must be!
I had to study the chip in one of my EE class. The technology in it is really really impressive. I love the memory architecture provisions!
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.
One, it gets no respect because nobody uses it. Where is the kudos for the transputer? Why does nobody love the Apple ///?
Second, yes it beats the x86 into the ground. I'm not surprised. Now show me how it compares against a real CPU. We've already seen that the Itanium is competing in a different space (supercomputers), so show me how it compares with the MIPS that SGI have ditched in its favour. I wouldn't be surprised if an n GHz MIPS stuffs an n GHz Itanic into the floor.
Probably because when it mattered a single CPU Itanic was more like $12,000 and not $2,000. After fucking up all their marketing and delivering strategies no one wants one anymore.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
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
a few reasons.
Itanium was a huge project jointly developed with many partners, most of the significant ones have long since abandoned the effort.
It was supposed to be the future of Intel - shipping units on the order of the pentium line. A redesign from scratch of how processors "should" be designed.
It's taken far longer, cost far more, and yielded far less than promised.
That's basically it.
Also, I'd be willing to bet Intel staked a bigger part of its decision on the availablity of platform independent binaries making serious inroads, which hasn't really materialized. Platform independence of the major OSS and commerical apps is obtained through porting and source-level compatability.
http://techworthy.com/PCUpgrade/SeptOct2004/64-Bit -Gaming.htm
Because for Itanium compatibility they'd have to port everything over to the Itanium proprietary instruction set. You can see how eager they've been to do that for Macs, so guess how likely they are to port it for Itanium.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Inertia, would be my answer to this question: Inertia of the technological kind keeps x86 on the desktop, even with the 64 bit extensions.
Inertia keeps Microsoft on the desktop, even though it being low hanging fruit for crackers.
Inertia can be a good thing... in this case, it's a bummer. I can safely say that my next game rig will be A64 powered, simply because of... inertia.
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
but my understanding, from the rumor mill, says that the Itanium was too little, too late and was partially aborted in an effort to get it out of the lab. It was a joint HP/Intel effort that was supposed to be the "next big thing" in processors, but dragged on so long in the lab (more than 10 years) that, by the time it was released, contemporary competitors already had nearly comparable horsepower and an established mindshare.
I may be entirely wrong, but I believe the dislike for the Itanium stems from the fact that you can't compile any decently optimized code for it. Apparently, even Intel can't create a good compiler/linker and toolkit for creating machine code that makes good use of EPIC. Even though the processor itself is more efficient and faster, the same thing compiled to machine code running side by side with an Opteron or any other x86-64 chip will see the x86 win. If somebody could come up with a decent compiler/linker that provided full EPIC optimizations, they would be bangin, but they don't have it so we don't use it.
The people who work on scientific applications take performance seriously. They put a lot of effort into optimization. The itanium architecture is hard to optimize for, and the compilers just aren't there yet for the general case. So you wind up with a disparity between the performance in scientific applications and general purpose applications.
Other reasons itanium can't compete:
1) Compare the performance of itanium with xeon/opteron in running native x86 code.
2) Compare the costs of building real end user systems.
3) Compare the availability of windows xp drivers.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
One, market penetration. Windows *kind of* works on Itaniums. Code has to be compiled specifically for the platform - they're not very good at x86 code through WoW.
The BIOS replacement they use is not functional. It's very difficult to set up disks for use, and if you lose the disk that the BIOS data is kept on, you're screwed. As far as I know, there is no way to make that fault-tolerant short of manually storing the contents of that partition on another drive.
Support for the Itaniums has been terrible. The HP systems are riddled with hardware problems, and their support personnel (at the enterprise level) have no idea how to comprehend that they don't operate quite like any other workstation.
People don't want a processor whose main purpose in life was to artificially refresh Intels control on much of the Intellectual Property associated with the processors. AMD is getting too close, so they change everything and hope to charge royalties.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
While, the IA64 has always had great floating point performance, there's an awful lot of us out here that don't need fast FPUs -- e.g. code development, database, web serving, network i/o etc. Sure, IA64 is a winner for the teraflop oriented supercomputing community, but for the rest of us, integer performance matters more. And for price/performance, x86 and x86_64 beat ia64.
to compile for Itanium. Speaking as a compiler researcher, Itanium is great for generating research papers because there are all sorts of things that you can do from a compiler perspective. The problem is, outside a research environment, someone has to implement a lot of the ideas in an Itanium compiler to make it useful. Unfortunately, most of the stuff in the Itanium research papers isn't easy to implement and most of what gets put into commercial compilers are the easily implementable ideas.
Why anything doesn't get the respect that it is due. It is because people don't want to give it respect. The Unix People go Well Sun Ultra Sparc (Or any other of the 64 bit Unix platforms) has be 64 bit for many years before the Itanium. The Apple crowd went well the Power PC is now 64 bit (although this is changing, and may possibly give Itanium some respect). The windows users are afraid of Itanium because it may break a lot of compatibility in their legacy apps. The Linux users are afraid of a complete Intel Dominance and put their development efforts to AMD 64bit chips. It is a state where you see the old king dieing and this is your only opportunity to get a change in government before the kings son gets in power. Why doesn't FreeBSD get the respect it deserves, or why doesn't Python get the respect it deservers. The winner is not always the best or even close to the best, the winner is often the one that people feel good about.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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. Well, it's sort of like Linux. The only way it people will use it is if it's already a mass market chip, but it will never become a mass market chip if people don't use it. Sort of an infinite loop.
Software is like sex. It's better when it's free. -Linus Torvalds
May as well as why Linux/Mac/*BSD/etc. doesn't get the "respect it deserves." There is no real answer.
My personal thought is that price:performance was not in line with other choices available to the end consumer.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
My systems professor told us that they chose to create a very complicated assembly language, that while may be efficient, makes programming un-nesceissarly difficult. If people don't want to program on your platform, you have a problem.
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
The Itanium was designed to change the way processors worked. Most processors today are some sort of dymically scheduled behemoth that are capable of detecting instruction collisions on the fly, and reordering instructions for optimal parallelism and thus performance in the light of those collisions. Itanium takes a completely different approach. It is an extremely wide processor that has absolutely no collision detection or reordering. All of the work in this respect is placed on the compiler's shoulders. In theory, a good compiler could make this chip very, very fast, and in reality, as you see, this can be the case. So why did it fail? Intel hyped the hell out of this processor, and then missed their release date by a full two years. That is microprocessor suicide in the land of Moore's law. So, when Intel delivered a chip too late that failed to perform the way they marketed it to, the chip died. In recent years, Itanium has really come around, but it's hard to escape your past in this industry.
Other relevant problems for adoption are tied to this need for a good compiler. Making a compiler as smart as it needs to be for Itanium to live up to its potential is not cheap, and Intel is not known for just giving away such technology. I'm sure the fees to license Intel's compiler are nontrivial, and that does not encourage development. Realistically, Itanium will never become a desktop chip just because of the massive adoption effort that would go into such a switch.
One thing to note, however, is that other chips aren't that far away. You suggest that a 2ghz or 3ghz Itanium would be incredibly fast, and I agree, but I seriously doubt Intel can ramp it that fast. Also, the Opteron specs you show are for 2.0ghz, and I believe Opteron is up around 2.6 or 2.8 ghz nowadays.
Ultimately, Itanium is a great design, but wrapped in a poorly executed initial implementation. It does teach a good lesson that compilers can really help improve chip performance, and down the road, architectures that take this into account may reign supreme. But I wouldn't look to Itanium to do any more than instruct us for the future. She is not a desktop chip.
I'd rather be cycling.
Peter.
Microsoft apps are nonexistent, and open-source apps tend to have crappy performance due to the fact that IA-64 depends overwhelmingly on compiler optimization. Developers can use Intel's compiler, but it requires work to use with most Linux systems (the only other platform that supports IA-64 besides MS, AFAIK).
Net result: no applications => no uptake, QED.
Egg, chicken, all that.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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.
The itanium is an amazing architecture with so many performance boosting upgrades that it would have blown everything out of the water.
If it came out on time.
It was so late that by the time it came out it was still better than existing processors, but not by a large enough margin to justify its cost.
As the clock speed goes up, and as the other processors find their limitations and drop out of the race, the Itanium will look better and better. There is, however, a large investment in time and software that must be made before it becomes truly useful. It is unlikely that MS is going to support more than one architecture simultaneously for the desktop or server as it tried to do for x86/alpha.
The big marketing push and the number of companies signing on to the good ship itanic coupled with the constant pushback of the release date caused Intel to lost a lot of the press attention they should have received when it did come out.
It'll be interesting to see what happens over time, especially as Intel wants it to be a server chip.
Of course, this could all be a big leadup to the announcement that Apple is going with the Itanium.
-Adam
When Itanium started, Intel was absolutely nowhere in 64 bit and high-end computing. Thanks to Itanium, over half Intel's competitors simply walked away from the market with little more than a few press releases from Intel.
Consider that at the time, you had Alpha (Dec), PA-RISC (HP), MIPS (SGI), and Sparc as leading 64-bit computing platforms.
HP in it's infinite wisdom was suckered the worst - giving up their own leadership position just to be strung along for many years in Intel's PR bluff. However Wall Street loved the "ooh, intel's story's so aWsUM that even HP is giving up" that SGI spun off and MIPS gave up on the high-end space; and Dec->Compaq->HP undervalued Alpha and it went away.
This has to be the most successful come-from-zero-to-wipe-out-half-the-market story in the history of computing. How can it be considered a failure.
Intel figured it was big enough to set the trend by making a radical change. It was wrong and paid the price when the market didn't follow. IBM thought it was big enough to set the trend by making a radical change with Micro Channel Architecture (replacement for the ISA Bus). It went nowhere and helped kill IBM's dominance of the X86 PC world it created. The fact that Intel didn't bet the farm and loose everything is either good planning or dumb luck on thier part.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Itanium was killed by intel's megahertz marketing. Why get an expensive 1.4Ghz itanium when you can get 2 3.0ghz xeons for less? The amd-intel 1Ghz race hit it even harder, since intel had to totally sell out itanium's higher ipc for the p3's higher frequency, and meant the p3 could be brute-forced to equal or greater performance as the new, non-mainstream itanium architecture.
In my opinion the p4 was the worst thing ever to come out of any microprocessor house in the last 20 years, as it not only comprimised microprocessor design for the horrible and blind-sighted goal of mainstream marketing, but essentially caused a large part of the current TDP crises the industry is in now, and reinforced our mentally handicapped reliance on single-threaded programming.
The humor in the itanic label has nothing to do with the chips, it has to do with intel trying to have it both ways: intel chips are the most powerful, with the only metric that matters, frequency, and ipc and design efficiency matter little, but also that "oh yeah and we have this amazing chip that is so powerful but runs at half the clock speed." It was a blatent contradiction in marketing messages.
For f*cks sake, they called their double-clocked alu "NetBurst"... seriously, why not add an onboard memory controller and claim it's "SuperBandwithMaker", which uses it's amazing technology to increase the speed of your dial-up connection...
Yes, if you market to customers by treating them as idiots, expect them to choose the stupid product, and ignore you when you claim to offer another product that "no really this is a good chip, not like that other one which we said was the fastest", which is actually better for you in the long run, because you can set a new foundation for improvement.
When amd came out with the opteron at 64-bit, and with surprisingly competitive performance while still running legacy apps at faster speeds, how do you compete with that?
Here's hoping they do manage to resurrect the alpha lines, Ibm even went a little over to the marketing darkside with the g5, trading frequency scaling for TDP, but they usually manage to rebalance the two after a few years of revisions.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
Java. Mainly.
Java is handy for many, many things. One thing it's not going to help is a large scale migration from one platform to the next. Years ago I am sure Intel thought it was going to be bigger, but it's not. Meaning more trouble migrating to new hardware platforms!
In my case, this is actually a load of bull.
I've never had a significant problem with a CPU that couldn't be pointed at some external issue with the platform - be it cooling, the MB chipset sucking, etc. Things that Intel -does- try to "Do Right" by us on.
That said - I use AMD CPUs pretty much exclusively in my work. Xeon 64bit wasn't there when we needed it (Feb of last year) and Opteron beats the shit out of Xeon on the stuff we do and finally, I can get -real- dual-core Optys -now-, not bolt-ons using the same damned broken shared bus that Intel x86 has been beating on forever.
Price, as a matter of fact, is no longer a consideration. I know I'm paying more for AMD. I'm also getting the product I want and need.
Itanium -could- actually fit into my DC. Everything we do is compiled by us, locally, and it's entirely possible that we'd benefit from it. However, even at 2k/CPU I can't justify the cost when we're looking at driving the CPU number up (our jobs are of the type where the more chunks you can divvy your dataset up into, the faster things get done - so the more processers, the better - it doesn't matter if that Itanium gets my process done in 45hours while it takes that Opteron 55 hours if I can throw twice as many Opterons at the problem and get it done in 30 due to smaller data chunks).
2. x86 is bad/ugly/dirty/whatever, however Itanium is not exactly clean either. The stacked register file is a good example of that. I personally prefer x86-64, which takes the evolutionary approach: fixes quite a few of the problems of x86, while still retaining the core features.
3. x86 chips do out-of-order execution; Itanium, OTOH relies on the compiler to schedule instructions and bundle them together. The main problem here is that doing instruction scheduling statically is much, much harder than doing it dynamically. An average program has a basic block size that is less than 10 instructions. It's very hard to find parallelism within such small basic blocks, so to be efficient at all, you need to do profiling to build traces/hyperblocks. In fact, profiling on the Itanium can give you a performance boost of 30%. However, profiling is hardly desirable from a software developer's perspective
The Raven
Intel was so late in delivery that all the high performance workstation people abandoned the Itanic.
From TFA...
That $2000 buys the processor, alone, and I don't believe I know any gamers that buy processors in lots of 1000.
The entire issue of price and performance is moot, however. The severe restriction to acceptance of the chip for the market is the ia64 architecture (with practically non-existant emulation performance). It is very difficult to find commercial software (even HPC software) available for the system, so you're limited to in-house programs and open-source programs (most of which need to be tweaked and rewritten). The platform isn't deployed in sufficient quantities to create enough demand for commercial vendors to bother supporting it yet, so you end up with the chicken-and-egg problem that most Linux gamers are all too familiar with.
Itaniums also have up to 9 Megabytes of cache. And they come with super heavy-duty FPU units. It's unfortunate that we can't directly compare the core architecture of the Itanium vs. the core architecure of the x86 without influence of the extra cache and FPU resources that the Itanium target market supports.
If somebody would build an x86 with that much cache, and increase the proportion of transistors in the x86 FPUs to match the Itanium's target market, then we could compare the relative benefits of x86 core vs. EPIC core. Until then, when you compare the two processors, you're most likely looking at differences in the logic units outside the core, which are determined by target market price/performance tradeoffs and which are largely independent of the core architecture.
I spent a while working on building cluster of IA64 machines in the HPC space. I don't anymore, and I can't say as I miss them.
First, as noted elsewhere, at the time when opinions were being formed, the cost of a decent dual processor machine with a useful amount of memory was about $30K (a typical HP cluster machine) while the comparable x86 box was about $3000. Today those prices are lower, but the x86 is still cheaper by several times.
Second, the HPC folks were perfectly happy running Linux, while no one else seemed to be. And Linux works on the machines. But in general purpose computing the advantages of the IA64 aren't seen.
Especially now when we have x86 with 64 bit memory addressing.
Next, the hardware (when you're willing to pay for it) was lousy. One box from HP had 15 fans for the 2 processors, in a 6 or 7U box. I think it would take off if you aligned it properly before turning it on. I can't imagine a rack full of these, much less a whole machine room (we had 2, and wouldn't allow them both on at the same time, but we had these in office space).
The EFI BIOS is truly an amazing piece of work. It's hard to work with on the console if you're a PC user expecting normal menu traversal with arrow keys (left and right arrow keys worked, but to move up or down you needed to use 'u' or 'd'). But we were building clusters, and expected to do things with the machine via serial interfaces. But the UI was even worse over a serial line. What happened to nice, easy to program command line firmware? (Note to HP Fort Collins: you're supposed to take the BEST of both worlds when you try to merge paradigms).
Yes, there was also a network interface which would take the place of the serial connection. But this wouldn't use DHCP, but rather manual network configuration, which required this funky hydra cable to connect to some other machine in order to set up properly. And each person connecting to this system would get write access to the console. There are decent ways to share a console across multiple logged in users (c.f. http://conserver.com/ for one example).
For a set of machines designed for cluster computing, they were about as unfriendly as you can get for us infrastructure people.
(Note, these hardware obvservations are only based on about 6 classes of HP machines that I've put my fingers onto; I have no knowledge of any non-HP IA64 machines).
Once up and running, they're not bad systems. But they're not so much better than x86 systems to win over most people. There's always a class of user who is willing to pay for the highest performance. But the larger part of the market pays attention to flops/dollar, and building a thousand node x86 system is still cheaper than 500 nodes of IA64.
(Disclaimer: I haven't had to price out IA64 systems for a year and change now; I don't believe my claims are invalid, but if someone can show me I'm wrong, I'd love to know it).
I have no interest in working on IA64 systems anymore, unless you're paying me to do it.
That's a neat trick. Considering the AMD64 architecture was released about 2 years after the first Itanium.
While you're right that Itanium was meant to keep AMD out of the market by essentially creating a new "proprietary" architecture, it's hardly made to be different from amd64 "on purpose" since they didn't really have any clue what amd64 was (since it didn't exist).
Oh, and it would help if Intel could make decent motherboards for its own chip.
It could be my information is out of date, but I don't believe Intel has made their own motherboards for years. It's just not cost-effective. Rather, they give specifications for boards and 3rd-party manufaturers then fabtricate their own varieties. Or at least that was the way it was when I co-oped with them. *wry grin* I always wondered how much they saved after the costs of bad publicity due to bad implementations. Amazingly often, a company would ignore corrections to their motherboard diagrams and of course Intel would get blamed when the motherboards would malfunction...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Well, there are many reasons the Itanic failed. It was a great architecture, a neat idea. Shift all of the intelligence in the chip up to the compiler, execute in-order, optimised code, get rid of deep bypassing, etc. Generally, get rid of the extra 50% of the chip that's dedicated to turning an instruction stream into a series of vectors.
Note, it *was* a neat architecture.
Then, everybody got involved. Imagine a roomfull of architecture, compiler, and systems PhD's, each with their own pet idea. And this chip had them ALL in it. Anybody remember the i432? In a way, this was the i433.
BUT. This meant a complete break with the current codebase, and in the final analysis intel didn't have the guts for it. Especially once their hopes for compilers weren't being borne out (once, Intel was a HUGE player in the market for compilers PhD's). So the guys at Intel decided to add x86 hardware compatilbility to this. Then, since their compiler plans weren't working out, they added out-of-order execution.
Now, all of these things had crazy interactions. Suddenly, who knew what it was doing? Then the power... all those units, executing all those dead instructions - it ran HOT. Then the fact that x86 compat and o-o-o were a gigantic boat anchor in terms of chip real estate, driving the cost through the roof pretty much sealed its fate. It became a "server processor". And if you get 7 or 8 P4's for the price of one Itanium... well, your cluster is better served with those 7 or 8 P4's.
Pride goeth.
The decision to move instruction-level parallelization from runtime (in the CPU, hardware, expensive) to compile-time (software, cheap on a marginal cost basis) ended up being a poor one for general-purpose computing. You save silicon not having all the fancy instruction scheduling, reordering, etc., but you lose the knowledge of the runtime environment the hardware has when you move it into the compiler.
.NET bytecode to native code and Transmeta x86 to native VLIW) can do a better job because they can profile the running code and get a better handle on likely execution paths. These would be a good match to the VLIW Itaniums to compensate for them lacking that "complex" hardware to keep the execution units supplied.
Sure, there's a lot more processing you can do off-line in the compiler, but you also have a lot less information about how the code is actually going to be executed at compile time.
Theoretically, JIT compilers (Java and
The Itanium2 makes a good supercomputer chip because you can optimize your code very carefully and you've got a good idea what the data looks like and what branches will be taken, etc. at compile time.
Most amusing to me was that the early versions had the chip serial numbers on the area covered with the heatsink. Removing the heatsink voided your warranty. You needed that serial number to get warranty work done on the processor.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Not so much respect as a "we have to" thing.
Itanium was supposed to be the new base chip, the thing to finally replace x86. Picture high performance and high volume, the other RISC guys weren't supposed to be able to compete. SGI and DEC cowered, shutting down ALPHA and MIPS.
HP decied they wanted in on Itanium early. They partnered with Intel on chip design. Intel designed the first chip, while HP's was the much more highly regarded Itanium II. They bet the farm on it, in some ways more than Intel itself, phasing out PA-RISC, and now trying to force people to move off of Vax and Tandem onto Itanium. They pretty much have no choice, having fired the other processor guys they had.
If you want to hear about respect, how about HP, the #1 Itanium vendor, killing off workstation class Itanium computers. If this isn't a white flag, resigning the chip into a nice market, i'm not sure what other interpretation there can be.
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.
Out of curiosity, I just checked itanic prices at dell. The cheapest configuration for a single (dual capable) 1.5GHz itanic with 2GB RAM and 36GB SCSI HD is over $17K. For comparison, a similarly configured 3.6GHz Xeon (also dual capable, 2GB RAM) is just over 5K.
The article poster is simply trolling. Where the fuck can you get an itanic for $2000? The cpu *alone* costs that much! The article that the moron linked to confirms this: "The 1.4GHz Itanium 2 comes out Monday for $1,172 in 1,000-unit quantities. A 1.6GHz version comes out in May for $2,408 in similar quantities." (last paragraph)
Need I give any more reasons for why it's not popular?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
That question answers itself: You think differently from most people. Highly specialized, hand optimized massively parallel predictable crunching seems to matter to you. It doesn't to most people. You're in a minority. Get used to it.
BTW, i860 and Alpha suffered from basically the same problem.
A couple of points that seem to have been missed when looking at why the itanium less widespread:
- each CPU is quite large, having a square surface area for the unit about 2" x 5" and it's about 2" high
- That area includes a voltage regulater and the passive cooling fans
- It doesn't include any of the necessary active cooling
If you add these physical factors to the points already made about heat, power and EFI bios, it's obvious to say that Itanium won't run in your mini-ATX destop or laptop. This isn't a slam on the design, as it was never designed to run in those form factors, but it's hard to see how any cpu today is going to have a wide use if it isn't available for dual use for destop and servers. Once you eliminate the desktop market, (and I'm going to lump the workstation market in with the servers) the number of places you can sell these processors drops considerably.Once you start adding in the lack of Windows support for itanium, the strides that the 86_64 architechture has made in capability, and the low numbers of current adopters, it's not looking like Itanium will ever gain widespread acceptance.
The Internet has no garbage collection
The whole point of Itanium is that it doesn't deal with dependencies at all in hardware, thus making its scheduling very easy to implement (move these bits over here). It makes the compiler to all the hard work so it can just burn through instructions. Modern DSPs are pretty sweet, but 8 instructions per cycle is a luxury realized only because DSP is by nature a very repetitive exercise, so tons of resources can be poured into very sophisticated operations such as what you mention above. The pipelines aren't where Itanium's complexity lies. Instead, it is very feature rich elsewhere (supports both Endians, x86 emulation, etc.).
I'd rather be cycling.
Hundreds and hundreds of products have been killed or permanently crippled because their first versions were terrible.
There's the answer! Now it's clear what has to be done to make this processor a success!
The first version was terrible, you say? Well, then simply apply the one and only strategy that always guarantees that an absolutely horrible first version becomes a great market success.
Put a sticker on it with the name "Microsoft".
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Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Why this chip is not for me are two reasons:
1: I'm not buying one before the software is ported to it -- and at a comparable price to its PC equivalent!
2: It may be a step above an Opteron for floating point, but is it still that step about a dual processor Opteron that I can buy today for less money than a mono-processor Itantium?
As for the "Itanic" jokes (all of which are way off-base, since heat output of any H.M.S. Itanic would melt any iceberg long before it could do any damage), blame The Register. I saw them use the term long before anyone else.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Your quoting FP performance. The "integer" (aka general purpose) performance isn't nearly as competitive. This is because its a static VLIW machine, and its hard to write a good VLIW compiler. Writing fast FP code is simpler. Then there is the fact that the Itanic is 3x the hardware of the machines your comparing it to. Bigger caches, and all that. Your misunderstanding of clock rate is also simplistic. In order to get the Itanic faster they would have to create a longer pipeline, this would more than likely decrease the IPC and keep the processor from scaling lineraly.
Basically it was pointless. we don't need yet another processor targeted into the same market the POWER64/SPARC64/PARISC and now the X86-64 etc are in.
The whole arch is a mess in my opinion its accually probably worse than the x86, this is evident in how long it took to get the thing out the door. For a processor based on the idea that superscaler wasn't easy and wouldn't perform its beginning to look like the itanic is accually in that boat. Its a dead arch, there are orders of magnitude more x86-64 machines out there even though the itanic had a two year lead. Why should I use itanic when there is a larger software base for PPC/POWER and its multivendor?
POWER is cheaper,faster and more mature and it can barely compete with x86 in the desktop area. ARM has pretty much taken over the smaller chores (cellphones, PDA's MP3 players etc..) and smaller chips like the 8051 clones sit below that.
Give it up, it was stupid, Intel was wrong. My opionion is that itanic was a marking plan to lock up the processor market. If we were all forced to run itaniums back in 96-98 then we would all be buying intel chips for everything. Instead intel had to release the P-Pro to keep ahead of Cyrix/AMD, only they never got far enough ahead to kill AMD to release the pressure and transition everyone to Itanic, where theyhold all kinds of patents and copyrights on the instruction set. Plus they couldn't make the thing work and it slipped for 5 years.
itanium (itanic) is a poor design for anything other than numbercrunching. It is a relic of theoretical supercomputer designs that were popular in the late 1970s. itanic shines on floating-point benchmarks, and is mediocre at best on everything else.
Since the late 1970s, we have had RISC and then superscalar RISC, some now with elements of VLIW. This provides better real-world (general-purpose) performance using substantially less power and fewer transistors than itanic.
Modern RISC processors (including x86 which are RISC internally) can reschedule execution of instructions dynamically (i.e. at run time). itanic can not. It relies on the compiler to schdule the code. It is only possible to schedule code well at compile time for very well-defined problem sets i.e. floating-point maths intensive programs like numerical simulations. NASA currently owns 5% of the world's itanic processors (in a single machine).
itanic was intel's attempt to kill the 64-bit RISC market, putting all of its competitors out of business. Like all great megalomaniacal plans, it has failed. It was a marketing-driven processor, and a failure.
It can't compete with clunky old UltraSPARC IV on server-oriented workloads. Even that market, which isn't big enough to sustain Sun and its processors, is orders of magnitude bigger than the market in which itanic has any relevance.
For big servers nowadays, you have a choice between Opteron and POWER.
In science and engineering, you're often better with something like Opteron, POWER or something fancy from Cray, NEC or Fujitsu. itanic runs hot and consumes too much electricity.
Has anyone ever seen one? I haven't. There was one at a show once on the Red Hat stand, but they wouldn't let me performance test it... and they wouldn't even let me see it because it had over-heated.
itanic is about the most expensive turkey in computing history.
Stick Men
First off, remember that the current Itanium is the Itanium 2. The original Itanium was a failure in almost every way.
A reason why the DEC Alpha and other processors died wasn't because of a bad design, it was because the software support wasn't there. Think about it, if you could run all your Windows apps under Linux, more people would run it. The difference in what software is available is a big issue. Sure you can recompile many things to run on a given piece of hardware, but for endusers and even when it comes to servers, if a company needs to spend a lot of time making a program run well on a new architecture, and it doesn't sell well, it's a waste of resources to do it.
So, look at the current market. The Itanium 2 is horrible when it comes to performance under Windows 2003 or Windows XP. If you have native support, then the performance comes up to speed a bit better, but compare that to the performance of an Athlon 64/Opteron and the P4/Xeon chips.
Then you have the issue of how fast does it do in the real world. Theoretical performance in benchmarks is one thing, but how well does it work in a real-world environment? Can you say that the Xeon can hold it's own against an Opteron with a multi-processor system? In some applications it can, but as time goes on, AMD has tweaked the Opteron and Athlon 64 design so even in areas where Intel has dominated in the past, AMD is getting much closer in terms of performance.
Why go to a new architecture, which means all new software when you can stick to a tested architecture that runs all your current applications faster?
The Itanium 1 is like the Pentium Pro. In theory it was better because it dropped the legacy support that plagues the x86 world, but since it failed to be better at running the current/older software for the x86 world, it didn't do well. Eventually the Pentium Pro design was used in the Pentium 2, and as a result it did well, but the original implementation was horrible.
The Itanium 2 design may eventually make it's way into the current x86 world(compatability and such), but very few would be willing to switch to it.
The Opteron/Athlon 64 design is up to 2.8GHz, and is expected to eventually make it up to the 3.8GHz mark which is where the highest end Pentium 4 processor is. All things considered, I'd stick with the Opteron for multi-processor systems, or Athlon 64 FX 57 for single-processor. You get the best of all worlds without the drawbacks.
Given your little performance comparison chart:
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
Maybe the question should be, why doesn't the ppc970 get the respect it deserves? I suspect that the ppc970 has a much smaller die than the itanic. Sure the clock speed of the ppc is 0.8 GHz higher, but who cares if the ppc costs 1/2 to 1/4 as much? Also, it would be interesting to know how much power each of them uses.
The Itanium, had it been an x86, would have been the next logical step from the Pentium. Microsoft's weak support and developer reluctance to switch instruction sets, have killed all hopes of application support. Only a select few are adventurous enough to support Itanium running on esoteric UNIX distributions.
I've been *HOPING* that Apple would use Itanium on their high-end Power Macintosh. This would have given a second wind to the chip's lack luster success. Apple really is the only company that can give Itanium application support. If they decided to support IA64 *AND* x86, they could offer a high performance option along with their budget Macs.
I'm saddened by the end of the G5 line, but I'd shut up entirely if it were replaced by the Itanium. That chip is just fast... and elegantly redesigned. As I see it, it's the best chip out there.
Apple is great at supporting odd architectures. Their O/S already supports multi-platform binaries... c'mon... somebody petition Apple to add an Itanium build option in X-Code... PPC, IA64, and x86 all at once. I'd be so happy.
If not I think you better go watch The Life of Brian and come back to remove the egg off your face.
My particular love for this joke is irony of looking into a room of Monty Python fans and they are all sitting there chuckling and repeating that very same line.
Yes, yes we are all individuals!
Classic!
I think the biggest thing that doomed the Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) was the fact that IBM did not bother to license the technology at very low cost.
If IBM had done a proper job of licensing MCA at a low cost then not only would MCA have replaced the old ISA bus, but alternative bus connection architectures like EISA, VL-Bus, PCI, AGP and PCI Express would have never happened! This is because we know now that MCA could be easily expanded all the way to 64-bit bus connections and support very fast bus speeds. Indeed, if you look at PCI and PCI Express connectors they strongly resemble the old MCA connectors in physical design.
Furthermore, having just tried to order a pair of Itanium 2 servers for a SQL cluster:
These supply issues quickly gathered the chip a new moniker - Unobtanium.