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Dell Dumping Itanium

Posted by Zonk on from the nice-to-have-known-you dept.

njcoder writes "In a PC World article it is disclosed and confirmed by Intel that Dell is dropping support for Itanium processors. 'After Advanced Micro Devices demonstrated that 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set offered a smoother transition to 64-bit computing, Intel released a version of Xeon with similar technology, and Dell now offers 64-bit Xeon processors across its product line.'" More from the article: "The chip maker has since backed off its original statements about Itanium and is now promoting the chip as a high-performance replacement for reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors in Unix servers from companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. Hewlett-Packard, a co-designer of the processor, has embraced Itanium as the processor of choice for its high-end servers. Fujitsu. and NEC are also among the system vendors that sell servers with the processor." The story is also being reported at Ars Technica.

12 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? by popo · · Score: 4, Interesting


    One has to wonder, outside the obvious explanation of Intel's anti-competitive trade practices, what is Dell's aversion to AMD 64-bit / dual-core processors?

    Clearly there is significant (and growing) demand for Opterons.

    Dell's outright refusal to offer AMD chips seems almost like proof of itself that Intel is acting in an anti-competitive manner.

    Has Dell ever put forth a better explanation?

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    1. Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? by mihalis · · Score: 3, Interesting

      One has to wonder, outside the obvious explanation of Intel's anti-competitive trade practices, what is Dell's aversion to AMD 64-bit / dual-core processors?

      I think that Intel gives a slightly better volume discount to Dell than anybody else. Partly this is because Dell's volume is bigger than most anyone else (I forget if they have exceeded HP yet), but the obvious suspicion is that there is also an "exclusivity bonus" - yet lower prices for a vendor who does not sell any of the competition's products. If Dell actually sold AMD Opteron based products, I suspect they would do very well on those products, but if they drove up their costs on every other system they sell, all still containing Intel cpus, then it might be a net loss, at least initially.

    2. Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? by nrgy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If you read some of their press releases they often make the hilarious comment "Are customers just aren't asking for them". But then browseing their store you can find tucked away mostly hidden links to Opteron systems for sale. So Dell which is it?

    3. Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? by vanango · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I don't think it's an aversion towards AMD, however they benefit more from Intel.

      Intel uses a very effective pull marketing strategy. Most consumers don't care about what processor they have. They don't understand it and they don't care to learn. However after their commercials, the name is known which makes the name sound reputable. Because of their "Intel inside" advertising, people aren't going out and buying processors, but demanding them from retailers.

      In addition, humans get confused easily. If you have 3 options: basic, standard, advanced let's say, the decision is easy. You know what youw ant and what you need and how much you can spend. When you throw in too many alternatives, people hestiate. Every moment a customer is hesitating and not purchasing, companies lose money. Now obviously there are issues with customibility, but giving customers too many alternatives can be a bad thing. Take Apple for example, why did they replace the mini with the nano? Was colored iPods a good idea? Is there a reason the nano is offered (as of yet) in 2 colors?

      Now imagine Dell's advantages to exlusivity. Ever additional product they offer, they lose money. It's costly in advertising, in inventory, in maintenence, in troubleshooting, the list goes on. Also as mentioned, they can buy more intel chips creating economies of scale for both companies.

      And of COURSE they are greedy bastards, it's a corporation. An American one out for themselves, hell, have you tried talking to Dell on the phone?

  2. Ummmm .... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Isn't everyone dumping Itanium? Why is Dell any different?

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  3. Writing has been on the wall by akuma(x86) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Itanium is all but dead... relegated to the supercomputer niche - and we all know what happens to supercomputer companies :)

    Intel has spent billions on Itanium and seen an effective return of 0%. Investors won't tolerate this for much longer. AMD's x86-64, and Intel's subsequent introduction of EMT64 (same thing), have finally pushed this ill conceived idea into its well deserved death spiral.

    It has no technical merit. But technical merit sometimes is a secondary matter in the business world. However, the economics don't make any sense - you can't introduce a new ISA into a mature software market and expect it to fly just because you're Intel.

    It was a mistake - write it off and move on.

    This should free Intel to deploy those valuable Itanium engineers (like the ex-Alpha team) to work on something that actually generates cash (like x86 servers). So while AMD might have a short term lead - the giant resources of Intel are more than enough to catch up and re-assert their leadership position.

    1. Re:Writing has been on the wall by akuma(x86) · · Score: 5, Interesting

      x86 processors have a fixed amount of decoder logic overhead vs. RISC. The decoders essentially dynamically translate the x86 instructions into more machine-friendly micro-ops which are very RISC-like.

      As transistor budgets increase exponentially (thanks to Moore's law), that fixed overhead gets smaller and smaller each generation - to the point that it's insigificant (less than 5% today and getting smaller tomorrow). So in the early 90s you could make a case for more efficient computing with RISC vs. x86, but today it's just so negligable that you don't care. There are also numerous micro-architectural tricks to get around the limited registers and wacky addressing modes.

      Couple this with the fact that 99% of all of the world's software is written for x86 and you have a very large inertia to overcome in order to change the ISA.

      Why would any software vendor port their application to a new architecture if that architecture is brand new and nobody is using it initially? This is a very expensive and risky task. Let's say that the incentive is increased performance with a new ISA (highly unlikely given that the ISA doesn't matter anymore given the very large transitors budgets). But let's be generous and give it a 50% performance advantage (again - this is fantasy land). Do you spend the 8 months porting, debugging, testing Photoshop? Or do you just wait 8 months for a 50% faster x86 to come out and instead spend that time improving your product as opposed to keeping it the same on a different architecture?

      You'd have to be crazy to take that tradeoff. And so, you see what we have today - x86 everywhere.

    2. Re:Writing has been on the wall by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Would a 9Meg cache really help an SpecFP benchmark that much? I'd have guessed an Opteron's FP pipes would be permanently saturated with well less than the full 9MB on many benchmarks.

      > So please... enlighten me on how the Itanium
      > architecture improves computing on any metric.

      Personally I like the predicate registers, conditional execution and rotating register files - a neat way to pipeline loops without unrolling. I like the concept of VLIW-style without huge amounts of nop padding (although it can't eliminate it). It also has pretty neat support for doing explicit cache prefetches in software.

      Some of these have obviously been done before to varying degrees (but I've not heard of rotating register files in a general purpose chip). Whether or not the chip as a whole was worthwhile, I think the nice bits have technical merit and I'd expect some of them to pop up in other places.

      Intel went through an interesting trend throughout the company of trying to push huge amounts of complexity out of the chip and into the compiler. This wasn't just Itanium: the IXP network processors have a *really* weird programming model (c.f. the much more conventional IBM designs). I occasionally wonder what caused *all* the architects at Intel HQ to go down this road on completely unrelated products (something in the water supply?). I must admit I *really* like the idea of pushing cleverness up the stack but if you're going to do it, you should provide *real* benefits.

  4. Re:Don't forget SGI by merreborn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Don't forget SGI

    I did. Is that bad?

    Seriously, I remember them being the biggest name in graphics back in '96. I thought they were dead and gone.

  5. Itanium isn't ALL that bad... by ajiva · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Itanium as an architecture isn't all that bad, and has some great ideas. The only problem is that with Itanium most of the work has to be done by the Compiler writers to get as much performance out of the machine as possible. NOPs are a killer on Itanium because they take up precious space on bundles. X86 and other architectures are not as dependent on compilers for performance (well ok that's not totally true). Either way normal archs have had 30+ years of research into how to optimize code while Itanium realistically has had about 5 or so.

  6. I actually use an Itanium... by rbinns · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have 2 machines on my desk for computational stuff. The Itanium2 box is used for my "set up and run overnight" jobs. It seems to run just as fast as the other box, a Dell Xeon box, but can run more jobs at the same time. Both systems have similar spec otherwise (4 gb ram, SCSI RAID, RHEL). The other major issue I have with the Itanium is software support. My processor program's vendor (CFD) has an optimized version for the Itanium, whereas no similar version of the pre-processor exists. So I mesh on the Xeon, run on the Itanium. I wonder if this chip is still a viable solution for heavy computation or if another architecture is superior?

  7. Re:Hmmm. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    if you are proud in ANY way of your customer support then you have been sucessfully brainwashed by HR and marketing FUD departments.

    I used to reccomend Dell's to people, I no longer do because of the nightmare the Tech support is, INCLUDING the platinum support level for the high end servers.


    Yeah, we moved from Sun to Dell, and if that wasn't the mother of all fuckups I don't know what is. I'm trying to get us moving back to Sun next year as far as servers go. I don't know what we're doing as far as workstations though as I'm a server guy.. but I do know that a shitload of them are having thermal shutdown issues, and the subcontractor Dell is using in our region for the small stuff seems to be slipping on responsiveness.