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."

Comments

Last Gasp for Big Iron?

[ackthpt]

Last Gasp for Big Iron?
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

Re:Last Gasp for Big Iron?

[ThePhilips]

> "Clusters are only really good for embarassingly parallel problems."

You are overall sort of right about that. It's just science isn't standing still and most of new algorithms are specifically invented to be parallelized.

Most problems of physics are solved with matrices. And matrices are of course are easy to parallelize. And physics - is the only who are buying most of big iron anyway.

Nowadays, most of the weather prediction tasks, astronomical tasks, optical tasks, micromeasurements tasks are also optimzed for clusters - not big iron. It's not about top performace - it's about price/performance ratio. For the same money people can buy cluster with e.g. 10 times more raw performance to run unoptimal (e.g. 2-3 times slower) algorithms - but task are done quicker. And cheaper. Yeah, clusters have higher latencies - but they are still dominated by batch jobs, not interactive jobs. Big Iron has better interconnects - but the redundant interconnects take lion share of such system costs.

In fact, the main reason why this have happened (clusters took over big iron) is the RAM prices. In my versity times (early-mid 90s), we all were occupied with shared memory problem: RAM was very expensive. Now people go to general store, pick several 1GB nics, pick several GBs of RAM, and pay a nickel for all that.

Ask anyone in Computer Science now, everyone started throwing RAM at latency problems of clusters. It does look bad on paper and in theory. But in practice it just works.

P.S. On-topic. IA-64 has great performance. But again, on price/performance scale it loses immediately to Intel's own Xeons and AMD's Opterons. Intel constantly refuses to amend its Itanic focus from features to focus on more affordable prices. The story line was quite well covered by The Register. Check posted links.

Alpha

[linguae]

Too bad HP won't spend $$$ to bring back the Alpha.

I miss architecture diversity....

Re:Alpha

[MADCOWbeserk]

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?

Re:Alpha

[evilviper]

Too bad HP won't spend $$$ to bring back the Alpha.

I miss architecture diversity....

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.

Re:Alpha

[Quadraginta]

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.

tisk tisk

[sardonic2]

seems just a bit too late. they should donate to help feed some starving children not starving platforms.

Here is the problem

[IntelliAdmin]

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.

Short Intel now

[countach]

>"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.

This is NOT it's last gasp.

[Chas]

This is more along the lines of post-mortem muscle contractions.

I'm sure that SOMEONE out there is willing to pour money down the toilet for this platform. And they'll make HP/Intel very very happy.

Then again, there's people who're into snorting drain cleaner too...

Let me get this straight

[dgrgich]

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?

Re:Let me get this straight

[ceeam]

To rephrase what somebody else wrote here:

1) Profit!
2) ???
3) Itanium.

Tsk Tsk Tsk..

[ackthpt]

seems just a bit too late. they should donate to help feed some starving children not starving platforms.

How do you know they aren't planning this as some method of helping bring an end to wars? If they get the pentagon buying Itanium equipped missiles, just think what they could do!

AFGHANISTAN - YBN Today it was confirmed that Osama Bin-laden was killed as a Cruise Missile, manufactured by Strongbad Industries asploded near his hideout. The Cruise Missile was equipped with an HP computer guidance system which employed an Intel Itanium processor. The missile missed the target, but Mr. Bin-laden was struck in the head by the processor's heatsink and died later from the injury.

Re:AMD64

[demachina]

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.

Re:AMD64

[jayslambast]

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.

Performance

[velco]

Itanium2 systems are among the top in transaction processing
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results. asp?resulttype=all
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

Intel is up to something...

[syncrotic]

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.