Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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?"

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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?

  2. 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>