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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."
So as I'm reading this there's a big plug for AMD Opteron just below the article. This would appear to me to be the threat to the Itanium, the same which effectively has killed big iron -- inexpensive commodity hardware. Sink a few thousand into Opteron systems and run what you already have, or sink far larger amounts into some gobble-de-gook system which won't run, except under software emulation, what your multiprocessor system does. Sorry HP/Intel and everyone else dumping money down this rabbit hole, I think you've lost the plot. Today's super computers are parallel computing down with 64bit Gen x86 processors, like the AMD Opteron. The glue is in the software, not in big fat chunks of expensive silicon.
if still not convinced, i might have a few meg of core to sell you
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
seems just a bit too late. they should donate to help feed some starving children not starving platforms.
No, you're definantly not the only one. What is the value of a 64 bit single core, non 32bit backwards compatible procesor that generatates more heat per mip than a jet engine? I know Intel bet the bank on this architecture but good god, it's dead Jim.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
The chip was made to compete with "Big Iron" servers - the only problem is that it is marketed to the windows consumer market, and that is who looks at it when making purchasing decisions. AMD has really started to eat up this space, and if Intel does not start to turn this boat around fast they could really get hurt when 64bit CPUs are commonplace.
>"Itanium has been taking share from both IBM power and Sun Sparc."
Uhh, it could hardly lose share could it? If it lost any share the product wouldn't exist. What, did they double their share from 1 to 2 users?
Ten billion is an awful lot to throw away on this loser chip.
I mean, few people actually WANT to run a different chip (and thus a different OS and versions of apps) in their data centre, compared to their desktops. They used to do it, because it was necessary. Now it isn't necessary, so people don't want to do it. Intel's only hope is to try and get people to use it EVERYWHERE, on their desktops too. But there aint no hope of that either.
What's the point of running "Big Iron" and/or Itanium if we have to deal with hacks/patches and headaches to run real world production applications like SharePoint, SQL and other Office collaboration suites?
Intel and HP spend untold sums of cash developing and rolling out a chip that comparatively few use. Thus, the market has effectively told them that there is not a large need for this behemoth. So how do they respond? A pledge to spend $10 billion more? How does this make sense again?
Itanium is so low volume, how could it possibly put a dent in SPARC and POWER? When a person looks for a new computer to buy, Opteron is on the short list, followed by PPC and SPARC. Itanium? Okay, for physicists, perhaps.
The UltraSPARC T1, if Sun can market it well, is the ultimate webserver, database server, and J2EE CPU. I'm extremely interested to see how many T1 servers Sun sells.
In spite of all the negative publicity, Itanium is quite far from dead. The recent corrections in path make a lot of sense. What really put Itanium out of orbit was Intel's decision to use Itanium in even the small and medium systems. This meant lost marketing focus, and some lame architectural decisions for x86 compatibility. Itanium has nothing in common with x86 except its made by Intel.
.Net Framework 64-bit and Sql Server 2005. (Not in Exchange Server, Biztalk Server etc. Earlier we even had Windows XP running on Itanium. Sigh!).
It seems the finally found the market:
Last week Intel went back on x86 compatibility, only software emulation. Makes sense, the market for Itanium is big iron. It is way to expensive for anything less. And the users better run 64-bit Itanium optimized code to get their money's worth.
Microsoft trashed all Itanium plans for the small and mid segment. They will support Itanium only where it makes sense in their product line, just Windows Server,
Intel's Motherboards supporting both Xeon and Itanium have now been postponed to 2009. This makes sense too, Itanium customers won't be interested in saving a few thousand bucks on commodity motherboards.
And finally 10 billion $ pumped in; good news. I'd think Itanium will be back, by 2008. Architecturally, it is nothing to laugh at atleast. It is just that it lacked everything else, platform-compiler-apps support.
Life is just a conviction.
Something smells fishy to me. $10 billion is alot of money for a marketing campaign.
Assuming that each Itanium chip retails for roughly $1,000, Intel/HP could simply give away 10,000,000 chips for the investment they're making. Do they really think that there will be enough demand for these chips between now and 2010 to make up for that kind of marketing expense?
I have a hard time believing they will actually spend anything near this amount on marketing, even if the campaign is successful.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Let me disagree with you on a few points:
... each clock cycle could allow the execution of up to 3 concurrent operations. Not if the compiler does a bad job, as many of them do now. Look at Itaniums performance on data dependent branches, it is underwhelming...
ad 1: Compilers can improve easily, with a recompile. this remark I consider extremely naive and it really, really hurts your credibility. The fact that a compiler can be recompiled does not mean it also automatically improves its logic. The problem with all the compilers for Itanium is in the logic, not in the execution. Recompiling the compiler without improving the logic might give you a faster compiler, certainly not a better one.
In order to improve compilers for Itanium the prefetch and scheduling logic in the compilers and assemblers needs to be vastly improved. Especially optimization for data-dependent branches requires a lot of additional work.
ad.2
A
B huh? Are you mixing up RISC and VLIW (EPIC) designs?
ad.3 The only reason Itanium has good SPEC performance is because the benchmark is completely deterministic in its execution. Itanium greatly (like: insanely) benefits from repeated compile-execute-profile iterations of the benchmark. Real world performance doesn't come close. Only numerical codes with very well understood branches can hope to approach those SPEC rates.
ad.4 I suggest the following literature first: Hennesey and Patterson, Computer Architecture (Morgan Kaufmann); Patterson and Hennesey, Computer Organization and Design (Morgan Kaufmann); Sima and Fountain and Kacsuk, Advanced Computer Architectures (Addison Wesley); Lilja, Measuring computer performance (cambridge); Jain, the art of computer systems performance analysis (wiley)
For some reason I'm thinking that $10 billion is probably more than they've ever made on the Itanic.
Well, that really depends on your perspective. It's great for people interested in doing advanced research on compiler technology, that runs our existing crappy C programs at the same speed on an architecture that makes life harder on the compiler. It sucks for people who are interested in doing research on compiler technology to make higher-level languages more competitive with low level ones.
I don't see the point of writing a super-compiler that can schedule C code at compile time, when processors can do that just fine at runtime. I think its far more interesting to focus on writing super-compilers that can make high-level languages perform better.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"non 32bit backwards "
Huh?, IA64 is a new architecture.
It is good that the x86 hardware unit is out of the die now.
It has hampered the design and speed of the CPU.
AMD is starting to kick Intel's pants in the most lucrative arena, small- and medium-sized servers. Instead of trying to compete technologically in that area (as opposed to just marketing), they're throwing good money after bad into a failing/failed architecture which only makes sense for a few highly-specialized applications. If it weren't for the fact that most holders of Intel stock know next to nothing about the industry, I would expect a cry for a change of leadership.
Sure, there are a few supercomputing-type applications where the Itanium really, really shines - but they're sufficienty specialized that Intel just doesn't move a very large number of CPUs.
Like I've said before, Intel is in a bind because of its own laziness and arrogance. Look at one of the primary advantages of the A64/Opteron architecture - the on-die memory controller. More memory bandwidth, lower latencies, and a memory subsystem that scales with the number of CPUs. Big-iron vendors proved that technology long before AMD decided to use it. Yet Intel has always enjoyed the superior manufacturing side of the business - if *anyone* could afford to have put those extra transistors on the die, it was Intel. Since they're almost always a step ahead of AMD in making smaller transistors, they had the *ability* to do something along those lines long before AMD did - but relied on the old tradition of more megahertz and lots of marketing. I don't think that this move is much different, they're putting their efforts in the wrong direction.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Well, the majority of commercial apps have 2% fp instructions. Sun didn't just stick a finger in the air and say let's build an integer only processor. If you look at the workloads that T1 is good at then look at the predominant workloads in procution today you will see that it covers pretty big 'niche' - in terms of revenue and volume. Niagara 2 will be even better at this (it will have a fully pipelined fpu per core for starters)
The chips are way over priced and too under performance for people to spend the money. No marketing campaign can fix that.
People like to talk about how Itanic, as it were, is a flop. It is, but not because it's not a good processor. Itanium is a very cool architecture with features long-time in coming. For instance, used properly, branch predication can be a HUGE boost to performance, and it's proven itself to be so when used properly on the Itanium.
The first problem is one of marketing. HP/Compaq is a screwed-up company, the merger of two wholy incompatible companies that could never work together properly. Put this together with the fact that they canceled Alpha, another great processor, and you can see that selling Itanium is more about politics than engineering. The next problem is pricing. For a single-chip solution, Itanium is awesome, if you don't count the fact that you could buy multiple Opterons for that price and achieve more performance with properly threaded code.
There are, of course, technical problems. Itanium is a heat monster. They didn't design it with power consumption and heat dissipation in mind. Did you know that the Itanium's top speed isn't limited by wire delays like it is in most other chips? No. It could actually run a lot faster, were it not for the fact that they can't get the heat off the chip fast enough. Another problem is the compilers. Static scheduling has its limitations, but the real limitation is that Itanium compilers can't manage to do even decent scheduling. It's too complicated. Much of Itanium's performance is theoretical. Given a small piece of C code, you can recode it in assembly and get it to run 10 times faster. If only the compilers were as smart as the assembly coder.
Itanium was a great idea. It's just being executed poorly, and the R&D is being put into the wrong place. The architecture is there. It's great. Now, get the price down, design it for lower heat dissipation, and get some people working on that damn compiler!
Consider: One of the compiler issues has been the ability to schedule all four pipelines with instructions that are useful, instead of no-ops. Now, consider using a method like the T1 does, where you have four sets of VLIW threads, each with on average 3 instructions. You could get away with executing the four threads with 12 pipelines on average. In effect, you can take the no-ops from one set and fill them with instructions from another thread, and keep the pipelines chugging. If tied together properly, it would have binary compatibility with current Itanic code, make use of today's ineffecient compiler generated code better, and make the arch work much more effeciently with OS threads ala the Sun T1. Given that the overall core (not including x86 and cache) for the Itanic is fairly small, something like this could probably be done very effectively and push the Itanic ahead.