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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.'"
Intel's chips will use that extra sillicon for a nice pair of fake breasts. That's sure to up their earnings next quarter. Take that AMD.
I think the days of it mattering what the exact instruction set is are pretty much over.
Sheesh, the Itanic wasn't exactly a success story. How does it fit into their new roadmap with cooler chips that eat less power? That processor was a goddamn space heater.
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?
"Of course, basically no one uses Itanium either..."
if they are going to dump x86 compatibility, why not dump Itanium compatibility and just go back to Alpha?
There's a sense of irony with Apple having, apparently, no problem getting PPC emulation to work on an Intel x86 ... and Intel having no joy running x86 emulation on IA64. If I didn't know better it would look to me like IA64 is a bag of crap.
Oh, hang on.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Politics. Yes, Alpha is a much superior platform, technically speaking, than pretty much anything else out there today. But for Intel to turn their back on Itanic (thank you, Register, for consistently misnaming the Itanium in such an apt way) would mean admitting that the billions of R&D they spent on it was a waste. HP also has political reasons to not resurrect Alpha.
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 work in Computational Engineering and can say that I know people who specifically write for epic because it is good at pushing the _huge_ amounts of serial computations (mostly solving large systems of equations) through the processor quickly.
I have personally had a dual itanium workstation sit under my desk for around 9 months. It was ok I suppose. I was doing Finite Element mechanical simulations on it and it did fairly well at it (it helped that it had 8 Gigs of RAM). I also got Gentoo compiled on it (this was before it was really supported) and it worked fairly well as a desktop (had an nvidia quadro card in it).
Personally, I think intel should just give up... they obviously lost the fight. But who knows, maybe it is actually making them _some_ money (although it can't be much).
Friedmud
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.'"
If you have the time to hand-optimize your code, it blows anything out of the water. This means it's useful for simple number crunching, but not much else - more processors are generally cheaper than more coders. It was expected that compilers would improve by the time Itanium was adopted, but that hasn't really happened. (I read here that the hurd coders were able to make their Itanium message-passing routine TEN TIMES faster by doing it in hand-coded assembly compared to what a compiler churned out)
I am trolling
Yes it is, because MB means 1000 Kilobytes, and MiB means 1024 Kibibytes. Usually you're off by a factor of about 0.91 or 1.1, which can mean a lot. Please don't insult the functionality of accuracy. :D
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
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...
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
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