Slashdot Mirror
Intel Dumps Iitanium's x86 Hardware Compatibility
Spinlock_1977 writes "C|Net is running a story that Intel is going back to software x86 emulation on Itanium in order to reclaim chip real estate. (room for another 9MB of cache?)
One notable quote about x86 emulation: 'Basically, no one ever used hardware-based IA-32 execution, so better to use the silicon for something else,' said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. 'Of course, basically no one uses software-based emulation either, but at least that doesn't cost chip real estate.'"
I think the days of it mattering what the exact instruction set is are pretty much over.
This is very old news. Various sources and die photos have showed this for more than a year... ...and no one cares.
The die space reclaimed was somewhat significant, and the software emulation is faster than the hardware emulation.
-- Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?
Sheesh. It took them what, 15 years to realize that they needed to DUMP backward compatibility to become efficient? *cough* 640K barrier *cough*
What strikes me is that only when they begin losing market share to AMD, they begin to search for design flaws (obviously they don't have time to waste in x86 emulation when they're falling behind)
Seriously. Is there any reason to buy one of the things? What does it do that justifies ANYONE buying one? Does it still have the "best" floating-point performance?
I think removal of the x86-emulation from the Itanium CPU was overdue. It should have never made it into the chip. Every serious software developer would have re-compiled their code on the new chip anyway. What I wish to see next is a dramatic reduction of the power consumption and return to the original promise by Intel to make the Itanium a replacement of the aging x86 architecture, not only for expensive servers, but also for desktop and notebook PCs. The x86 is smashhit because it is available for so many different applications. The Itanium however was pushed into a niche.
Yes, there is a whole family, and I think they sold like 2 units last year. I kid, I kid. However:
For 2004: Intel misses Itanium sales mark by $26.6bn
And this is biased, but more current: Reality Check: Itanium - A Sound Bet for the Future?
From that article's sidebar:
Granted, Sun is pretty well biased, but itanic looks like it's long since sunk to me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Although it may not run as cool and will use around 100W of peak power (+/- 10%), Montecito will be dual-core and run at around 1.6-1.8GHz at launch. 100W is less power than the current high-end Xeon MP and just over the Sun US-IV+ processors, but each of the two cores gets 12MB of L3 cache. Compare that to the ~120-130W power envelope of the mid/high-end Itanium processors available right now.
Granted, the Itanium is not the fastest enterprise-focused processor out there, but at least they are trying to reduce the overall power consumption and heat generation of the next-gen Itaniums.
For the workload I deal with everyday, the Opteron and US-T1 are better suited.
Actually it was.
THe Itanium has an impressive FPU set to make it fast in certain situations like scientific apps but other than that its been subpar and expensive compared to cheaper Xeon's and other risc processors like IBM's Power.
The Mercedes was supposed to be the new Xeon for servers and workstations and NT with its portable HAL was supposed to eventually migrate to the chip and would overtake the desktop market after teh apps appeared. It was all teh rage at Zdnet computer magazines and was termed the next big thing by Intel.
Mercedes (Itanium) was Intel's kneejerk reaction the Powerpc which was a threat in the early to mid 1990's.
Mercedes was supposed to be here by 1997 and it still hasn't delivered its promise as the next platform out of x86. I get modded down every time I talk about the Itanium but the engineering specs and things that just went wrong are stunning. The first version never came out because it was too slow which delayed it for another 2 years for its next version. The next one(first publically released) had to be overclocked and require a 1 pound heatsink with a fan that sounded like a jet engine just to be nominal. Intel loaded it with huge cache to make it go faster in certain benchmarks which brought up the price and size of the chip. HP killed teh alpha next to make it look like the Itanium wasn't as slow in comparison.
Carly Fiona did alot of strange things in terms of arm struggling Intel and forcing the cancellation of the Alpha in favor of the ITanium because she lacked the concept of "sunkin costs" or bad investments. Itanium does not make HP or Intel really any money. I am not talking about its technolical abilities but from a business standpoint.
Switching to an alpha would have been better and cheaper with stronger performance. Windows2k was out in beta3 on it at the same time as x86 and Linux and BSD support was already strong. Not to mention HP already had VMS ported to it.
The premise behind VLIW was that as chip says limits things you can do with hardware there needs to be a shift to software and leave the fast ram (cache) on the chip. Turns out huge improvements in fabrication made this argument false and somethings like branch predictions just can't be done in software. Fast dedicated hardware is faster than software. Who came up with this idea of moving optimization to software?
If I were Intel I would can Itanium and start over. Transmeta had something interesting and the new PentiumM's are rumored to be designed by a small Isreali firm bought by Intel with similiar technology. I think that is the next big thing.
Of course a newer Alpha would rock. Sigh
http://saveie6.com/
I find is odd that Intel keeps backtracking to its 20 year old Pentium Pro design. Both of their recent high-budget designs, the P4 and the Itanium proved to be a flop to some extent, while the P6/Pentium Pro/PII/PIII/Centrino/Banias architecture has scaled amazingly well since its humble 200 MHz beginnings.
Was there a generation change at the design offices? What else could have caused the most prominent chip design firm to lose its ability to do solid engineering? Granted even the golden boys created a dead end (i960) architecture, it wasn't quite as expensive a mistake as Itanium...
I remember that in the nineties new chip generations would be popping up left and right, each of them offering some really unique and cool innovation in terms of memory management, execution streamlining or heat management. But Transmeta was the last memorable innovation, and since then everyone seems to be exclusively focused on cache megabytes and transistor sizes. I would love to see real experimentation and innovation reintroduced in the CPU arena...
I think the days of it mattering what the exact instruction set is are pretty much over.
Indeed-- which is why it's hilarious that pretty much the entire world is just this moment moving to a single common unified instruction set. The server world has standardized on x86-64, Itanium is a walking corpse; the PC world has standardized on x86 as well, PPC has retreated to video game systems. We are moving to a new world of processor agnosticism, at the exact same time processor agnosticism has become largely pointless.
Damn shame, that. If they'd poured as much money into Alpha as they did into Itanic, they'd have a platform that would whomp all over everything currently in the marketplace.
I don't know that I agree. The alpha was a particular set of optimizations. Dual register files, branch-prediction hints. pure 32bit (sub-32 bit data access had to be emulated through a multi-step process). Deep pipeline (for it's day).
But at the same time, they purposefully witheld adding out-of-order execution (plays havoc w/ their highly optimized register configuration). Sparc had similar problems with their rolling register-stack.
I studied the alpha prior to the announcement that their new version would have out-of-order, so I don't know if they ever did go that route.
The point is that by adding all of the techniques that were employed by modern CPUs (aside from slightly higher speed memory), they would not have maintained much of an advantage. Their performance would be comparable to the AMD-64, but not much faster.
I'd still love to see the alpha kept alive, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, except it's price (for general work-station use).
-Michael
I studied the alpha prior to the announcement that their new version would have out-of-order, so I don't know if they ever did go that route.
;)
Yep, with the 21264 - aggresively out-of-order CPU. The 21064 and 21164 might not have executed instructions out-of-order, however they were highly speculative. AXP arch was designed for out-of-order from the beginning, the two early CPUs did memory IO out-of-order. 21064 had a 32 entry register file it seems, not 2, btw, according to a paperp on the AXP 21064 I found on google written by a DECy.
Their performance would be comparable to the AMD-64, but not much faster.
Agreed, cause guess what: AMD64 is Alpha's progeny-in-spirit.
The AMD K7 is very alpha-like (hence so is the K8). Highly speculative, out-of-order, wide multiple issue CPUs like the 21264. Not co-incidentally given that Dirk Meyer, co-architect of the 21264, led the AMD K7 design team. K7 used the 21164/21264 EV6 PtP interconnect too. K8 made it routable with HyperTransport - just as DEC^WCompaq did with EV6 in the 21364. You would still expect this mythical equivalently developed Alpha to beat AMD64 though, given it'd be able to use the die-space 'wasted' on x86-decoding for something more productive (cache or somesuch).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
The x86 was never used on itanium ? crap.
Sure ist was ( and I assume is ) used - for the firmware. IIRC, the EFI-firmware of the Itanium boxen was entirely x86. They use the x86-ISA for running the x86-based firmware of add-on cards. That way, Itanium boxen are able to use about any PCI-card out there, without
them having any special firmware.
Alphas did that in software, which mostly worked but far from working with everthing.
SPARCs and the PowerPC-based Apples have PCI, but neither is able to handle standard
PCI-cards for exacty that reason, which is why you have to shrug off $$$ to get the same
PCI-hardware with their native firmware support.
Ok, any PCI-card stuffed in an Itanium box would need decent OS-drivers, but at least
that is in the realm of the OS-vendor and drivers can be ported. Only very few
PCI HW-manufacturers ever did anything but x86 firmware, geared towards BIOS.
EFI, the firmware that ships with Itaniums, is quite good at handling that crappy
PC-BIOS type firmware. Need a decent RAID-controller ? Just stuff it in.
I'd call that a big plus. There are and have been numerous misconceptions about Itanium
from the very beginning, but saying "Nobody needs on-chip x86" is utterly stupid.
IIRC, the chip "real-estate" needed for x86 was in the lowish single-digit percentage
of the total chip-real estate. And it was a good investment, since it saves $$$ for
anybody running Itaniums. It was there for exactly that purpose, until some marketing
freak obviously decided to sell that as "backwards compatibility". x86 on Itanium was
and is dead slow, but for POST/Init purposes, it is sufficient.
Please, intel, keep it. If Itanium is ever going to be a success, users will happily
welcome the ability to extend systems using standard off-the-shelf components.
And, while we are at it, start shipping EFI for the "x86-crowd" now. I think, i am not
alone with the perception, that hitting "CTRL-S", "ESC whatsoever" at the right moment
during POST to enter some firmware configuration tool of some card, just plain sucks.
I want a firmware shell. I want x86-style SRM. EFI is close to that. Intel even
open-sourced major parts of EFI ( www.tianocore.org ). AFAIK, the Intel-based Apples
will use it. I want it too.
For gods sake, keep x86 in Itaniums.
Regards