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New Itanium More Powerful, Power Efficient

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the try-try-again dept.

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?"

7 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Bumber for Intel by sgt+scrub · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  2. Re:Sell off Itanium by GnuPooh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Intel didn't sell off an ARM division. ARM has always been a separate company. They BOUGHT the StrongARM part of Digital/Compaq years ago and renamed it XScale and still have it.

    Secondly, the current Pentium-M/Core processors are decended from Pentium-III and Pentium Pro, so the thing they learned from P4 was that it was a dead-end architecture. I'm sure there are some elements here and there they "backported" to Pentium-III to make the current Dual Core 2, but you statement is not really accurate there either.

  3. Price by jefu · · Score: 3, Interesting
    It seems quite likely that if Intel were to push the Itanium more and get it used in more systems that the demand would rise and the price would therefore drop. Of course, this might require a lot of demand, but if the performance is good enough for the price, the demand will be there.

    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.)

    1. Re:Price by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Even with a sufficient market, right now that chip is going to be expensive. It's huge and the yield can't be that high.

      But that's kinda the problem. The cost and the fact that's its a very niche processor will never make it as common place as Xeon or Opteron processors. Specially when both Intel and AMD are pushing SSE you can get a lot of the parallel SIMD like benefits of IA64 on x86.

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    2. Re:Price by boner · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The Itanium has horrible price/performance for web-serving... the ad-hoc nature of web-serving does not do the architecture justice. The new dual-core x64 Conroe offering would be a much better choice.

      Has anybody noticed that the Conroe effectively kills Itanium for most workloads?

    3. Re:Price by nkpatel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      While x64 may be better-suited for web serving, part of the reason x64 seems to be better than ia64 on most other workloads is that you may not have the OS and software optimized for the ia64 architecture - you're still writing and compiling in a x86-centric view and I don't think compiler technologies have evolved to the point where they can fully utilize ia64 ILP.

  4. Re:Working with the hardware directly by nkpatel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I gotta call BS on this one. I work on the development team for many of these servers. (No, I'm not allowed to tell you when they'll ship, so don't ask). There are NO chipset issues I am aware of, and the units are not crippled. I'd be interested in finding out why you think this is the case. Case in point: ahref=http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_ detail.asp?id=106071802rel=url2html-4549http://www .tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=10 6071802>