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New Itanium More Powerful, Power Efficient
Heir Of The Mess writes "Intel have a press release out about their new Itanium 2 Processor. The new processor doubles the performance, and improves performance per watt by 2.5 times compared to the existing single-core versions. The flagship model triples the cache and can execute 4 threads/instructions per processor enhanced by Hyper-Threading. Transistor count is a whopping 1.7 billion. Triples the previous SPEC_int_rate_base_2000 record. Retails for US$3692 for the top of the range.
So yes the Itanium crew are still pushing forward. I wonder if this could help save SGI?"
So yes the Itanium crew are still pushing forward. I wonder if this could help save SGI?"
Considering how little buzz this article seems to be generating (even on Slashdot), it seems like this might be a case of too little, too late.
The world has moved on from iTanic to x86-64.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Intel's profits fell, according to their earnings report last night.
Not good for an INTC shareholder.
The problem with the IA-64 platform is there are so few applications for which it is well suited. And even for problems it IS well suited it's a matter of figuring out how to extract the desired performance.
:-)
That said, a well tuned IA-64 application can smoke the best offerings from x86 world [on both sides of the fence]. But a $3700 USD price tag may push people away. Specially since processors like the Opteron 285 are nearly half the price and way more flexible.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I can tell you that the processors are not even in production at the main server manufacturer backing the Itanium family (ie, not Intel, the other one*).
We have seen a few proto style units roll through, but they have all had serious problems and are not running at full speed. The engineering group either cannot or will not give us a reason why these units are running crippled, but we believe it to be a chipset issue. Hopefully we will see the servers rolling through our manufacturing process within the next 60-90 days, but no management timelines have been released.
Here's to all those of us who want that raw power and are looking to pay for it!!!
*Won't disclose the name since I don't know if this info violates my NDA, but screw it, the public should know this stuff. Information does deserve to be known.
-drach!
2^3 * 31 * 647
They double the performance and lower energy requirements, improving performance per watt by 2.5 times compared to existing, single-core versions.
So does this mean that performance is 250% of the original or 350%?
I believe that EPIC does go on
Once more, you opened the door
And you're here in my heart,
And my heart will go on and on.
To the tune of 20 billion down the drain until it smashed into a simple AMD hack of the x86 instruction set. Yeah... It goes on... Nothing outlasts the Energiser...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Maybe Intel needs to sell off their Itanium division like they did with the ARM division. Concentrate on the area the are best in. Hopefully they learned some lessons from Itanium / IA64; like they did with P4 / Netburst.
Didn't the old Itanium have something like 9MB of L2? Wow.
I buy machines for our 100M product: 4 way opteron 870's with 8G Ram (2/proc) 2x73G Cheetas. Retail the box would cost about $7000. If one processor cost me $3500 life would suck. I can't see this processor doing the work of 4 duel core opterons.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
It might be worthwhile for Intel to find a way to drop the price enough to put these things into more places. Even give them away to visible web installations (like slashdot, fer'nstance). Get a bit more market penetration, convince some vocal people that its a good buy and it will start to take off. (I'd be glad to take an Itanium system for free for web service - even though my primary web presence is anything but big. Even better a couple of them to let my students use for compute bound projects.)
Whenever you set out to reengineer a foundation, and you throw money at it in the form of more engineers, you are asking for long delays if not outright failure.
Seastead this.
These will be very rare collectors items in a few years.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Exactly. Montecito is DOA; Over a year late and no where close to its performance goals. This article is just PR fluff.
LOL at the 10 billion in monopoly money Intel got other companies to commit to Itantic.
It's interesting the way so many people on slashdot are willing to disregard or even diss intel's Itanium strategy. Admittedly intel mistimed the itanium introduction, trying to move the processor world in a whole new direction just as AMD started producing some good chips was a mistake. Though to be fair to intel it isn't clear they could have foreseen this when they made the decisions. However, just because Itanium isn't going to run the next version of WoW or Quake doesn't mean that it is dead or a bad idea.
Itanium's big advantage is that it is simply a better ISA. Anyone who has done x86 assembly knows it is clunky and old while the IA64 architecture (except for the x86 emulation part) is well designed. Trying to improve x86 single threaded performance is ultimately a losing battle. Exacting a little bit more parallelism out of x86 instructions requires more and more transistors for smaller and smaller gains.
In the long run if you need more single thread performance IA64 or similar strategies are the way you have to go. Sure it is taking a long time to work out the bugs in the compiler technology but that just means intel has that much of a leg up when x86 single thread performance hits a brick wall. Also the work intel does on the itanium produces technology and insight that can be transfered to their other processor lines.
Remember intel needs to keep the big picture in mind and can't just look to the next 2 years. Rather than an indication of error I think the long time it is taking to iron out the IA64 technology is proof of foresight rather than an indication of a bungle.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
You remember when development of this chip was announced right?
1994. I remember the day I read the article in computerworld about the HP and Intel alliance and the new CPU, sounded interesting.
12 years later they are shipping about 40,000 anually.
This thing is simply not going to take off.
We may yet see an Itanium that competes but I'm not holding my breath for Vista.
Seastead this.
Admittedly intel mistimed the itanium introduction
Mistimed? Intel had been working fruitlessly on it for 8-10 years when AMD finally realised there was an opportunity to pull a Microsoft on them (i.e. consumers like compatibility more than new tech).
Itanium's big advantage is that it is simply a better ISA.
Debatable. It really depends on the application. Itanium does have a nicely designed, regular ISA that is awesome for serious number-crunching, but the VLIW approach really isn't optimal for general-purpose, non-parallel code. It's wasteful, and hard to optimise for. x86 is clunky, inconsistent, badly lacking in registers and a complete pain to code and decode, but it is at least quite compact (fits into small caches). x86-64 improves on this (a little) by adding more registers. PowerPC code is probably better than either, for most jobs.
I think the long time it is taking to iron out the IA64 technology is proof of foresight rather than an indication of a bungle.
I don't think it's a question of "ironing out" the technology any more. They've been working on improving the compilers for years now, and it performs really well - for certain jobs, like SPEC ratings and HPC apps. But it's not going to get much better than it is for what most of the world wants. It's a niche product, the market knows that, and it ain't moving out of that niche any time soon.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?