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?"

Comments

The ship has sailed

[powerlord]

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.

Limited Scope

[tomstdenis]

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

Working with the hardware directly

[drachenstern]

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!

Re:Working with the hardware directly

[nkpatel]

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>

Price

[jefu]

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.)

Re:Price

[boner]

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?