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.'"

Comments

Better use for sillicon?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Shouldn't matter with modern software.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems most of the better software today either falls into 2 camps:

• Software with source available; so "configure; make; make test; make install" will work, and
  
• Virtual machine based stuff (Java/JVM, .NET/CLR) (even popular on cell phones these days)
  

I think the days of it mattering what the exact instruction set is are pretty much over.

Re:Shouldn't matter with modern software.

[Eightyford]

Virtual machine based stuff (Java/JVM, .NET/CLR) (even popular on cell phones these days)

So that's why it takes two friggen minutes to turn on my cell phone!

Re:Shouldn't matter with modern software.

[bobcat7677]

Now I understand! That little coffee cup symbol that comes up on my phone is really telling me to go have a cup of coffee while I wait for the Java software to start. And all along I thought it was not functional at all but just an amusing little pun on the "Java" name... Silly me.

Re:Shouldn't matter with modern software.

[chris_eineke]

You mean 'a Java programmer with a collection of instances of class ModPoint'. ;)

Re:Shouldn't matter with modern software.

[Hurricane78]

I'm sorry, but this is plainly wrong!

The CPUs of a modern mobile phone are the same that are in modern gameboys: ARM9 (or sometimes lower)
The only difference are the added chips for multimeda and other stuff in gameboys.

As someone who actually *wrote* a game engine and other apps for mobile phones in java i can tell you that it IS java's fault!
The best proof is that apps compiled directly for the chip run at least three times faster without doing anything better.
So it can't be the chip.
Even with the libs of the phone manufacturer it does not become much better, because additionally to still bein slow as crap it does not run everywhere anymore. Even if you automated the different screen sizes, performances, buttons, and so on...
But at least you don't have to stick with the extremely minimal functionality of MIDP 1 or 2. ;)

At least for me i can say that I will never write a program for a virtual machine ever again!
If you *have* to compile a different version for every phone out there, you at least don't want it to be slow. ;)

Intel is continuing development?

[DurendalMac]

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.

Re:Intel is continuing development?

[questionlp]

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.

Re:Intel is continuing development?

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent mocked:
>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.

See: http://www.ideasinternational.com/benchmark/bench. html

Make special note of the SPECint2000 page and SPECfp2000 pages and also make note of the TPC-C scores.

The Itanium 2 takes the top three SPECint_rate_base2000 spots (128 cores), the top SPECfp_base2000 (single core) and the top two SPECfp_rate_base2000 spots (128 cores). The 64-way HP Superdome (by now they're all Itaniums, so they don't bother noting PA vs Intel) is in four of the top eight nonclustered TPC spots.

In short, the Itanium 2 is the best scientific computing chip on the market, as proven by the SPEC_int_base2000 and SPECfp_rate_base2000 stats (beating out the Power5). Also, it's not too shabby on the TPC numbers, only being edged by the IBM Power 5.

If you don't work with a 16+ core Itanium 2 or Power5, please STFU about them being market failures. They're not marketed at you.

Re:Intel is continuing development?

[Billly Gates]

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

Re:Intel is continuing development?

[timeOday]

STFU about them being market failures. They're not marketed at you.

That's Itanium's biggest failing of all. It was once intended to replace X86, now it has been pushed back into a tiny supercomputer niche where it will never pay off.

As noted elsewhere

[C. E. Sum]

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.

What he meant to say was..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Of course, basically no one uses Itanium either..."

why not Alpha

[xx_chris]

if they are going to dump x86 compatibility, why not dump Itanium compatibility and just go back to Alpha?

Re:why not Alpha

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Extend the logic

[drinkypoo]

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:

At a Glance: Is the Intel Itanium Processor a Sound Bet for the Future?

• Consumes more power, generates more heat, costs twice as much as x64 processors
• Dual-core version delayed until mid-2006
• First dual-core version to ship with drastically reduced specifications
• Major server vendors, including IBM and Dell, have abandoned development
• Competitive pressure on the Intel Xeon Processor could force Intel to abandon the Itanium processor
• Rapidly increasing x64 performance eliminating need for the Itanium processor

The Intel Itanium Processor's Troubled Year

• December 2004: HP hands off development and ownership of the Intel Itanium Processor to Intel
• January 2005: Microsoft announces it will not support Windows XP on the Itanium chip
• February 2005: IBM announces it will not support the Itanium platform in its latest chipset. "It is a function of the market acceptance of Itanium," said IBM CTO Tom Bradicich
• September 2005: Dell announces it will not offer any Itanium processor-based servers
• October 2005: Intel says the release of a dual-core Itanium processor has slipped to mid-2006, and that the common chipset with the Intel Xeon Processor, designed to reduce the Itanium processor's cost, has moved out to 2009

Granted, Sun is pretty well biased, but itanic looks like it's long since sunk to me.

Where have all the good designers gone?

[kerecsen]

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...