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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 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.
Hey, bwalling is right! We shouldn't just take what other people say and assume it's true!
Wait...
*brain asplodes*
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.
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.
I protest! For the record, I have *never* publically stated that Itanium was "crap". I reserve such sentiments exclusively for products from Microsoft.
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.
I worked at a startup that was building a database ~70 gigs in size. It took 2 months to build said database. Lots and lots of very small lookups and inserts.
Memory was our bottleneck. More ram equals more speed. So we spent BIG bucks and bought a quad Itanium with 12 or 16 gigs of memory (I forget exactly how much it had).
The Itanium was slower than a dual X86 with 2 gigs of memory! And not just a little slower. We spent weeks trying to get the database optimized.
Why does no one respect the Itaniums? Intel made a slow chip. Then they released the sequel. I've already paid my dues on that line once. I'm not playing this round.
Agile Artisans
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.
Yes yes! We're all individuals!
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