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.

tisk tisk

[sardonic2]

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

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.