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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."
Disclaimer: I'm not hyping Northern Colorado as being "the next Silicon Valley". Intel is taking over the old Celestica plant next to the HP campus in Ft. Collins, Colorado, and AMD is looking to open up about 200 jobs in the same area (being Ft. Collins). Interesting move... http://circuitsassembly.com/cms/content/view/2709/ 94/
Itanium has been taking share from both IBM power and Sun Sparc.
True but can they compete with the UltraSparc T1 (which has 32 threads compared to Intel Itanium's 2 threads)?
No Sigs!
It smacks of prior business arrangement HP, et al, agreed to back in days of yor, while Itanium was supposed to be "the next big thing", when Intel was telling everyone they wouldn't need the 64 bit CPU's AMD was gearing up to peddle. Intel's calling in all those promisory notes after making compilers and stuff available for so long. Having their druthers, I think everyone else would rather not.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Couldn't agree more. Alpha was a great platform leaps and bounds above any of it's contemporaries in terms of speed. They were running at 125mhz when pentium 66mhz came out and got more done per cycle. The Compaq DEC merger hurt it badly, then the HP Compaq merger killed it. Itanic has always been a ponderous mess. Had Alpha gotten one tenth the R/D budget that Itanium got it would be server king.. Itanium (please don't try to prove me wrong with benchmarks) gets wiped by Power and Sparc, will die a lame duck kicking and screaming death.
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?
"The history of science is cluttered with the relics of conceptual schemes that were once fervently believed and that have since been replaced by incompatible theories." -Thomas S. Kuhn
It seems to me, just about all the huge advantages that alternative architectures (like the Alpha) held over x86, have been washed away in the past few years.
64-bit memory space. Insanely large cache. Very low-latency access to RAM. Incredible memory throughput. PCI-X/PCI Express slots on cheap motherboards. Seriously high-end graphics. DMA. SMP. Built-in 1000Mbps NICs. RAID. etc.
What advantages could something like Alpha have over x86 now? A few years ago, I was anxious to jump ship to another platform, but with the introduction of the Opteron and kin, I'd say I'm quite happy with x86 now.
The only feature I really want now is a new way to handle interrupts... Then simple things like copying CDs, or a little network traffic won't bring PCs to a crawl. Perhaps add a socket for an FPGA or other simple processor to specifically handle those tasks, like the math coprocessors of the old days.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well...my work (scientific computing) put a premium on sheer scalar speed, and for that the RISC architecture was great and the x86 CISC paradigm a drag. Once you learned how to write code in a certain way, DEC's compilers could make amazingly fast code out of it for the Alpha.
In case you're wondering, no, parallel computing was never a good option. There's a large class of scientific problems that just don't work very well in parallel, because of large-wavelength correlations that make it painful in the extreme to write a parallel algorithm, if you can do it all.
Itanium2 systems are among the top in transaction processing. asp?resulttype=all
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results
and THE top one for clusters.
It makes sense for such an inventmen to go to
a) improving the fabrication facilities - achieving lower defect rates
and reducing price;
b) improving the fabrication process - aiming at higher clock rates
Remember also the recent announcement that an Itanuim CPU will no longer contain essentially a whole IA-32 CPU.
~velco
MD or MC simulation for systems with long relaxation times. My particular target was solution macromolecular conformational relaxations, e.g. polymer backbone twists and turns.
See, with that big polymer backbone you can't break the system up into cells or anything, and you can't divide up the problem in the time domain, because of course what happens at t+dt depends very much on what's happened at t. So you're stuck, you've just got to do the simulation in a single thread.
You can use multiple processors to better your statistics. That's just running the simulation over and over again from similar initial conditions, and since every simulation is fully indepedent you can just run them on multiple machines or whatever -- there's no advantage to any finer-grained parallelism. This is nothing to sneeze at, but it's still mostly just making nice smooth graphs for the publication.
The kinds of stuff I was trying to do involved up to multiple millions of timesteps, to the point where I started to worry (in the MC case) about the random-number generator, ha ha.
10 Billion? That means it is just as important to humanity as nuclear fusion? WTF?
This just makes me insane, I know it was already mentioned several times that people wish HP would put this kind of effort into reviving the Alpha. But to read about them putting this much money into a piece crap like that Itanium after the way they chucked out the Alpha, is expecially galling when you consider that in HP's own internal testing, Alpha EV8s and 9s consistently wipe the floor with even the latest Itaniums.
my old sig is obsolete, and I haven't come up with a stupid enough new one yet
Is there really a $140 billion dollar opportunity here? Does Itanium really offer something so superior to other available platforms that its creators are justified in believing they can acquire a large fraction of the market?
Yes. Absolutely killer parallel performance.
For certain tasks (such as matrice operations), it can do one operation, simultaneously on 100 registers (the Itanium has around 300 registers), it's pretty specialised, but for certain tasks, it can be a speed demon.
A lot of the performance griping was caused by either, the 32-bit X86 emulation, which was always ridiculously slow, or, using it as a general purpose processor, not the specialised one it is.
I always thought of it as a niche architecture however, I'm not quite sure why Intel's throwing so much money at it.
#!/bin/csh cat $0
A pledge to spend $10 billion more? How does this make sense again?
That ain't hard at all understand. Are you familiar with the term "minimizing your losses?"
Intel and HP clearly believe that in spending $10B they will generate more than $10B in revenue. In other words, if they spent no more money at all, they would lose $X, now they expect to lose $(X+10B-Y) where Y is some number larger than $10B.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If you think that the X86 platform has "caught up" with all the others, you are dead wrong. X86/32 or x86/64 does dead last in terms of total processing on any particular task. X86 is designed to do a large variety of tasks. Given a narrower scope, X86 gets blown apart by the likes of the Cell processor, used in the latest Playstation 3 in terms of total processing power - at the cost of genericity.
The Cell processor is highly optimized for graphical output, while the X86 is a "workhorse" number cruncher and all-around get-it-done engine.
The MIPS per transistor of the x86 is pretty low, as is the MIPS per clock cycle. So, if you want to run a mail server/Spam Asssassin/Greylisting on a system, use X86. But, if you want to produce realtimee graphiccs for video games, Cell is the way to go...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Recently an article was published on anandtech that puts the itanium in a new light: it's actually very efficient in terms of die area utilization. Combine this with Intel's recent announcement that they were scrapping the hardware x86 compatibility on the itanium, which takes up a fair bit of die space, and you have a very small core of the sort that's absolutely perfect for multi-core applications.
Itanium needs a lot of cache to function well, for reasons that the aforementioned article describes, but it's not unreasonable to assume that intel's shared cache technology from Yonah will make its way into Itanium.
This thing might be trying to compete with chips like the Ultrasparc T1.
I can give you a list of advabntages of other architecture over x86.
- your already mentioned interrupt handling
- effectively using Registers for argument passing
- no need for real mode switch to access firmware/Bios
- thread switches in less than 50 cycles
- a memory table lookup in less than 50 cycles, or occasionally even COW and dirty pages flushing without table lookup at all
Just compare the virtual memory handling and the interrupt handling and the parameter passing the task switch sections in the linux kernel for the different architectures. You will see the x86 versions for each problem to be by far the messiest and most manpower intensive and least maintainable versions. Several times worse. And when you compare the boot cose (which admitably only gets executed once though) it is a difference of several orders of magnitude. Hell, they even have a very own whole assembler in the Linux build tools just for writing those 20 instruction needed to boot it. Because no proper compiler or assemble would use those instructions anymore for anything.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
Just like when gambling, it's not the money already in the pot, that's already gone. It's how much you're willing to spend extra to get it. The pot odds don't look good to me.
I've been a HPUX sysadmin for 9 years (help manage 16+ large servers). We started buying a number of Itanium boxes and have moved some apps to them. The IA64 chip is much faster than the PA-RISC, 40-60% improvements for us and overall cheaper to buy.
However, the Opteron machines we have running Linux blow them away at less than half the price loaded up. I honestly don't see IA64 lasting another 2-3 years and I'm already making plans to migrate what we can from PA-RISC to Linux based machines instead of IA64.
I really like HP-UX. It's not the most robust OS, but it's been rock solid for us over the years. Very, very, expensive like all closed Unix Vendors but for a large business it was money well spent at the time compared to Windows NT.
If someone is really dumb enough to throw money down that toilet I just hope they remember to flush often between handfuls of bill. Sorry to see IA64 go without even ever having had a chance at it, but even viable 64-bit veteran architectures like the Alpha have gone down that drain.