Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now show me how it compares against a real CPU. ... I wouldn't be surprised if an n GHz MIPS stuffs an n GHz Itanic into the floor.
Guess what? It doesn't. Itanium really does outperform MIPS and if you'd care to look it up yourself, you'd see. Itanium and POWER have been rougly neck and neck in vying for the top performance spot since the Itanium 2 was first released. Each new processor from either vendor bests the other.
As for your disparaging remarks about X86, consider that it offers the highest performance outside of Itanium and POWER on floating point and overall keeps pace on integer code. Topping X86 is, believe it or not, a real feat. Top of the line AMD64 and Intel chips are engineering marvels as far as processors go. MIPS certainly can't touch them.
It may be fashionable to dis X86 but if you look at the numbers and the microarchitecture, you'll be hard pressed to find anything significantly better.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.