Dell Dumping Itanium

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.

Comments

I Blame Sun Microsystems

[AKAImBatman]

Guess McNeally got under Michael's skin. :-P

Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[popo]

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?

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[js3]

or maybe intel offers a better deal for them and they are greedy bstards?

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[mihalis]

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.

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[nrgy]

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?

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[popo]

IMHO that's not an acceptable explanation for offering zero AMD servers.

Its not as if Dell sells AMD servers at a higher price. Clearly there is an enormous amount of demand for Opterons. All the market metrics show Opterons taking a larger and larger piece of the server market. Dell's server business is hurting as a result, and still they offer no AMD machines.

Furthermore, if as you say "Intel offers a better deal" -- and that deal was based upon exclusivity. (In other words: "You get a 15% discount if you sell only Intel chips"), It seems to me that that would be illegal and anti-competitive.

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[popo]

No its not like saying that at all.

If Coke said to your local supermarket: "We'll give you a 10% discount if you don't stock Pepsi -- even though Pepsi represents 36% of the market", that would be anti-competitive behaviour.

The case already went before the Japanese Trade Comission and AMD won. I have a hard time believing that the scenario is different in the US.

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[popo]

... right, but either way its the "if you don't sell Pepsi" part that's the illegal bit.

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[js3]

well it is up to dell to take the deal or not, that's why I say they are greedy. If someone offered me an exclusive deal (the key word here being offered not forced) then my greediness would decide whether to take it or not.

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[vanango]

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?

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[Doctor Memory]

IMHO that's not an acceptable explanation for offering zero AMD servers.

Well, then, you're a retard. Why would someone give up a N-where-N-is-large% discount from the supplier that will provide 95% of your processors just so you can sell 5% of your volume with processors from another vendor? How are you going to explain to your shareholders that you're going to raise production costs by millions of dollars just so you can do a couple million dollars more in sales? Do you honestly think that AMD is able to offer Dell better prices than Intel?

And let's not forget that Opterons, despite "taking a larger and larger piece of the server market" still have a less than 12% share. If Dell's going to tweak Intel's nose, it would make more sense for them to go with IBM's Power line of processors for the high-end. IBM's doing well with that line; unlike HP, whose Itanium sales haven't managed to outpace PA-RISC declines.

I like Opterons (I have a Sun Ultra 20 at home), but suggesting that Dell destroy its margins just so they can offer a processor that's more appealing to you (I'm guessing you're not a Fortune 100 CIO planning to outfit a dozen or so new data centers) is just stupid.

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[Anonymous Struct]

We buy a lot of Dell hardware, and we've asked this question every single year for the last 3 years. Every time, the answer has been that AMD can't provide chips fast enough to make them viable for distribution. Basically, they don't feel like they'd be able to meet demand, and they'd have customers waiting on hardware that may or may not be coming some time soon. That's what they tell us, at least.

Don't forget SGI

[Anonymous Coward]

SGI uses Itanium for their Altix line of products that run Linux. They need Itanuim for its ability to handle hundreds of processors in one system with cc:NUMA, and its huge physical address space for their customers who need several terabytes of RAM in one system.

Re:Don't forget SGI

[merreborn]

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.

I blame Intel

[vlad_petric]

For not making Itanium competitive enough ...

Ummmm ....

[gstoddart]

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

Writing has been on the wall

[akuma(x86)]

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.

Re:Writing has been on the wall

[Zemplar]

"It has no technical merit."

Excuse me? Modded +5 Interesting, but incorrect on this one point.

I hope you just made an honest mistake and don't really believe that nonsense.

Re:Writing has been on the wall

[TheRaven64]

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).

Many of the Alpha team went to work on the Opteron. Or did you think that it's resemblance to the Alpha was a coincidence?

And I don't really think Intel need to do much catching up. They are behind in the server market, and ahead in the laptop market. The server market is shrinking, and the laptop market is expanding - it sounds like they are exactly where they wish to be.

Re:Writing has been on the wall

[akuma(x86)]

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.

Re:Writing has been on the wall

[akuma(x86)]

I really do believe it has no technical merit.

I am paid to design processors and have worked on SPARC, MIPS and x86 designs for a span of over 12 years.
I spend my days thinking about how to improve processors. That's all I do... all day long.

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

Any performance advantage that you see today is solely due to their having much larger die size and pin count budgets vs. other processors just to compensate for their having a crappy ISA. If you give the same budget to a comparable x86 or traditional RISC processor, their absolute performance and performance/watt would far exceed any Itanium.

Put a 9MB cache on an Opteron and see how well it does on SPECFP for example.
An Opteron beats the Itanium 2 handily on integer code with just 1MB of cache.

Re:Writing has been on the wall

[Lemming Mark]

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.

Re:Fair play

[$RANDOMLUSER]

> That's why we had the "Pentium(tm)" and not "586" being marketted.

No, Intel tried (and failed) to trademark a number and so had to come up with names.

Once again, crap wins

[DesScorp]

Let's see...you've got a superior technology that suffers from bad company management ... Itanium.

You've got less expensive yet outstanding technology that suffers from poor market share (for the time being)... Opteron

And then you have a bloated, legacy, piece of shit technology that's a crude copy of Opteron, a Pentium 4 with hastily tacked on 64 bit instructions (copied from AMD), a technology that Intel doesn't even believe in, that they themselves think is inferior.... Xeon

Guess which one will dominate the market?

Sometimes IT really does suck.

Re:Once again, crap wins

[leathered]

Let's see..

McDonalds, the world's largest restaurant chain that wins countless awards every year for culinary excellence and whose head chefs have sold millions of copies of their recipe books.

AOL, the geeks' favourite ISP reknowned for their quality tech support who can effortlessly guide you through tunneling VNC over SSH at 3 o'clock in the morning.

General Motors and Ford, the greatest car companies in the world who consistantly teach their Japanese counterparts lessons in safety and reliability.

Dell, the world's largest computer manufacturer...

I'll stop now, I'm soooooo depressed.

Re:Hmmm.

[Lumpy]

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. I have a 8450 server loaded with a 7 foot tall rack of powervaults connected to it and It was like pulling teth to get the thing fixed. the techs blamed the "cables" of the powervaults several times and took 2 weeks to get us up and running again after a fatal crash because the powervaults were starting rebuilds of spare drives and then offlining them breaking the raid 50.

dell tech support sucks. that is why we are moving back to HP.

I type this from the best laptop that I have ever had, a Lattitude D800, the hardware is sound, but they drop the ball everywhere else.

not anticompetitive!

[conJunk]

if as you say "Intel offers a better deal" -- and that deal was based upon exclusivity. (In other words: "You get a 15% discount if you sell only Intel chips"), It seems to me that that would be illegal and anti-competitive.

What on earth do you mean? That's about as standard as it gets. It's called exclusive licensing, and that's the way it goes. Companies offer price incentives to sign exclusive deals. It's competitive because Dell is free to sign exclusively with anybody.

Here some other examples: Your job. Your company offers you $100,000/year to build widgets *exclusively* for them. If they wanted a clause in your contract that said that you may not build widgets for anyone else, you aren't going to say it's anticompetitive.

How about your car? Toyotas ship with (I'm making this up) Panasonic audio components. If you asked Toyota to make a line with Zenith components, they'll probably say "sorry, but we have an exclusive agreement with panasonic."

I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it assuredly is not illegal.

Re:not anticompetitive!

[popo]

"What on earth do you mean? That's about as standard as it gets. It's called exclusive licensing, and that's the way it goes. Companies offer price incentives to sign exclusive deals. It's competitive because Dell is free to sign exclusively with anybody." No, IANAL but I don't think that's true at all. Were that the case there would be no such thing as "anti-competitive behaviour". Microsoft bundling would be seen as "exclusivity". 'Exclusivity' means that you have the sole right to distribute a product within a certain region or territory. But as far as I know it does not mean that that right comes with the other requirement that you don't stock competing products. As far as I know, that would be the very definition of "anti-competitive". Any lawyers in the house?

Re:not anticompetitive!

[ectospasm]

It is anti-competitive. It's just not necessarily illegal. At least in the US, companies aren't allowed to require exclusive licenses if it can be proven that they have a monopoly. Doing so would be an abuse of their monopoly status. IANAL, and all that.

It is arguable whether Intel has monopoly status or not.

Re:not anticompetitive!

[popo]

> Fortunately for us, there are other chip manufacturers than Intel.

As there are other operating systems besides Windows. I don't think the definition of monopoly requires singularity.

Re:Fair play

[diegocgteleline.es]

for using their x86-64 technology?

Well, then Intel may sue AMD aswell because of the x86 32 ISA, right?

In fact x86-64 is pretty much the same instrucion set except that it has been extended to support 64-bit registers, etc. So you could very well say that x86-64 ISA is a derivative of the x86-32 bit ISA.

Of course intel and AMD have cross-license or some shit so they can use whatever stuff they want without licensing issues, but i think it was worth the post

Itanium isn't ALL that bad...

[ajiva]

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.

I actually use an Itanium...

[rbinns]

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?

Not long now for SGI

[leathered]

They bet the farm on Itanium and will shortly pay the price.