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Intel and HP Commit $10 billion to Boost Itanium
YesSir writes "Support for the high-end processor that has had difficulties catching on is coming in from its co-developers Intel and HP. 'The 10 billion investment is a statement that we want to accelerate as a unified body' said Tom Kilroy, general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group."
Its pretty good for vectorizable Fortran codes like those typically run on supercomputers, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, crash codes, and 3D molecular modeling. These kinds of codes can be scheduled by compilers to take full advantage of the instruction parallelism in Itanic's EPIC instruction set. Itanic is a dog on most of the C and C++ codes most of the rest of the world uses on their computers because compilers have a pretty hard time scheduling four instructions in parallel at compile time on C and C++ codes.
There is a market for Itanic in some traditional supercomputing applications but it is a relatively small market and never been a big growth market. I really doubt Intel and HP will ever recover the billions they've already sunk in to Itanic, let alone another $10 billion.
I imagine the people at AMD are dancing in the streets at this news because Intel and HP are going to keep throwing even more good money after bad trying to salvage this dog. Its money that they wont be investing in R&D in markets that really matter.
AMD can continue their push to dominate servers, workstations and desktops. If they could crack laptops, phones and embedded apps Intel would be in serious trouble.
@de_machina
Well, not in a small processor system, but once you start building larger and larger systems, Itanium (or Power5+) have the extra 'features' for error handling and reporting that an x86 don't have. Xeon and Opteron have the error handling of a fleet of 1950's cars. Sure they have alot of horsepower, but when they break down it stops running. You might have to drive the car a couple of more times to determine whether the car needs to be replaced. In a large computer system, this increases the down up time of a system. Itanium is like a BMW X3. Sure its a gas hog, and maybe a little less horsepower, but when it breaks down, you have tons of status lights to tell you what's wrong, and which processor is broken and whether the part is still good (a cache single bit correctable error) or needs to be replaced (mbe error on the fsb.) In large system, you can determine the source of the problem, whether it was an ignorable or replacible the processor error or a chipset problem.
If any of you have ever put together a computer that has a bad part, its sometimes really hard to figure out what caused the problem. Systems that Itaniums usually go in have the error detection and error logging to exactly pinpoint where problems lie. This is the reason oracle DBs use these type of processors. It doesn't make sense for the common user to use Itanium, but companies like Amazon and Visa want these systems more for the reliability features than the speed.