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Intel Details Eight-Core Poulson Itanium Processor

Posted by Soulskill on from the here's-a-thing-that-exists dept.

MojoKid writes "Intel has unveiled details of their new Itanium 9500 family, codenamed Poulson, and the new CPU appears to be the most significant refresh Intel has ever done to the Itanium architecture. Moving from 65nm to 32nm technology substantially reduces power consumption and increases clock speeds, but Intel has also overhauled virtually every aspect of the CPU. Poulson can issue 11 instructions per cycle compared to the previous generation Itanium's six. It adds execution units and re-balances those units to favor server workloads over HPC and workstation capabilities. Its multi-threading capabilities have been overhauled and it uses faster QPI links between CPU cores. The L3 cache design has also changed. Previous Itanium 9300 processors had a dedicated L3 cache for each core. Poulson, in contrast, has a unified L3 that's attached to all its cores by a common ring bus. All told, the new architecture is claimed to offer more than twice the performance of the previous generation Itanium."

17 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by PCK · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was under the impression that Itanium was all but dead. I'm guessing Intel must be contract bound to bring out new versions.

    1. Re:Why? by Guignol · · Score: 4, Funny

      I understand
      In death, an agent of project Itanium has a name
      His name is Robert Poulson

    2. Re:Why? by ewanm89 · · Score: 2

      Yeah, I'm sure there was a big argument with oracle threatening to sue when Intel said they were dropping Itanium architecture several months ago.

    3. Re:Why? by unixisc · · Score: 2

      The recommended ASP is ~$4000/tray. Anyone know how many itaniums are there in a tray? Multiply the unit price by 200k, and you'll get the cash that Intel would be making on those.

      But honestly, there are some markets Intel should attack w/ this CPU. For starters, supercomputers. The platform from Cray discussed yesterday - that one looks just perfect for a whole bunch of these. There are quite a few supercomputer projects in a number of countries, and Intel should target the Itanium at all of them. That alone would have a bunch of them flying off the shelves.

      One thing I believe - by tossing more cores at the problem, just like w/ the i-Cores and others, Intel has possibly eliminated a major drawback that Itanium, as a VLIW based CPU had - namely a complete break in compatibility b/w generations. This was something that would have threatened to sink the platform, but since Itanium I & II didn't take off, there ain't a whole bunch of legacy software for Itanium III to support. But Itanium is the wrong platform for legacy OSs such as NonStop or OpenVMS - it's probably perfect for supercomputers, but not much more.

  2. There are a hell of a lot of Itanium users by attemptedgoalie · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'll be buying a number of systems with these in a few months when they hit the street and the budget's ready. I'll be able to virtualize a lot of our old PA-RISC boxes into a smaller and more efficient set of systems.

    But you're right, they suck because you can't play Angry Birds on it.

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    My mom says I'm cool.
  3. Re:Failtanium by TheLink · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think there is a world market for about 5 Itanium computers.

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  4. Great news for Oracle databases! by gtirloni · · Score: 2

    The next upgrade will surely make things fly!

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    none
  5. What's twice a small number? by davecb · · Score: 2

    My leaky/biased memory says these machines were a speed disappointment. Is this doubling going to make them faster or slower than an x86?

    --dave

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    davecb@spamcop.net
    1. Re:What's twice a small number? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 2

      At least according to Wikipedia, Itanium's performance was disappointed when compared to other RISC architectures, ten years ago:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Itanium_.28Merced.29:_2001

      One of the traps Intel tends to fall into, at least according to someone I know who worked there during the Itanium "hype days," is that the architecture team does not communicate with the compiler team. Both Itanium and x86 fall into this trap, although x86 is far more illustrative of the problem (most compilers can only take advantage of a small fraction of the total number of x86 instructions; most instructions are too complicated, and most programming languages do not make it easy to specify when such complex instructions are advantageous). I suspect that in a few decades, compiler technology will have advanced enough that Itanium would beat the pants off x86 in typical "enterprise" applications, although by then Itanium will probably have been forgotten.

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      Palm trees and 8
    2. Re:What's twice a small number? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Perhaps Intel fell into the trap of not communicating with the compiler team, but HP certainly did not.

      The development of the EPIC concept at HP already started in 1992 as the to-be-successor for the HP-PA architecture. Look up e.g. the many joint research papers of CPU-architecture and compiler engineers for PlayDoh (or see e.g. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/93/HPL-93-80.html for an intro to PlayDoh).

      The compiler technology to do well for EPIC architectures was mostly available by the time IA64 launched. Arguably it hadn't advanced enough to be considered "ready for prime time", but things like data flow analysis of predicated code (http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/96/HPL-96-119.html), if-conversion (various influential papers), VLIW scheduling (e.g. selective scheduling a la Moon&Ebciolu), interprocedural analysis and various other interprocedural analyses were available and actually implemented in the HP compiler and probably also in the Intel compiler.

      (John C. Dvorak wrote "How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry". Perhaps one day I'll write "How the Itanium Revived Compiler Scalar Optimization Research" :-)

      I think a bigger problem for Itanium was the underwhelming Merced. We used them mostly to heat the SuSE Maxtor building, they weren't good for much else. Slow, power-hungry, inefficient. And by that time, the market for things like database servers and high-end engineering workstations (where HP-PA was big) was imploding due to the advances on commodity architectures like AMD64 running Linux or even just Wintel32. Merced was a disaster, the chip wasn't ready and the compiler technology was not available widely enough, and by the time Madison came along the reputation damage was too big to be undone.

      It probably also didn't help that support for Itanium in Linux was never very good. The "typical hacker" didn't have access to IA64 and the major companies supporting IA64 didn't invest in Linux-for-IA64. Compare how IA64 funding for Cygnus/Redhat got cut before binutils was complete (to this day, binutils for ia64 is still far from complete) to how AMD funded and cooperated with SuSE to get a good x86-64 Linux ecosystem even before First Iron. Also, GCC is only since recently beginning to catch up with the proprietary compilers of HP and Intel (and also e.g. SGI's Open64), but neither HP nor Intel ever really understood how GCC is a corner stone for the whole GNU+Linux system. For example, bash compiled by ecc was much faster than bash compiler by gcc -- but no Linux distribution ever shipped an ecc based complete distribution. An official LLVM port for IA64 doesn't even exist, but a port for the long-dead Alpha *does*. What does that tell you?!

      Mis-management and lack of vision are as much a cause for Itanium's failure as the technology itself....

    3. Re:What's twice a small number? by eabrek · · Score: 2

      The early processors had a functional unit for translating x86 into Itanium (it was probably area-wise bigger than a 386, but it just read x86 opcodes and produced Itanium instructions). It was later removed, and x86 support was handled in software: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20060120105942.html

  6. Thank you HP? by jandrese · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I guess all of that money that HP has been dumping into Itanium development is finally paying off. Everybody else assumed Intel was just going to discontinue the product for obvious reasons, but here they are releasing a major upgrade to the core architecture. It still makes me wonder what HP sees in Itanium that makes them so gung ho about it though. Is it the vendor lock in? Is this upgrade enough to finally push Itanium past x86 based processors in some performance metric?

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
    1. Re:Thank you HP? by Desler · · Score: 2

      It's because they spent a shit ton of money porting software to it. They don't want to have to incur that cost again to port away.

    2. Re:Thank you HP? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      Still who is going to buy it now?

      Remember the Alpha? Slashdot ran on Alpha's for 5 years. They had a new version out and it didn't matter. HP wanted Itanium and purposedly made sure people wouldn't buy it and crippled the product line for the inferior Itanium. Makes you wonder why they bought it?

      After Windows 2000 dropped support in RC 3, it didn't matter. Who in their right mind would invest in a dead platform?

      This new chip could be 20x faster than a xeon and use 1/10 of the power! No one wants to invest in it and be dumped later by the likes of Oracle.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    3. Re:Thank you HP? by Abalamahalamatandra · · Score: 2

      Hell, on the OpenVMS side, it wouldn't shock me a bit to find out that they don't even HAVE a team any more that's capable of porting it to other architectures. They likely say they do, to fulfill government contracts that specify that OpenVMS can't be orphaned, but I wonder what the reality is.

  7. The most important improvement... by eap · · Score: 4, Funny

    From TFA:

    Poulson can issue 11 instructions per cycle compared to Tukwila's six.

    These go to eleven.

  8. You can still buy Itanium?!? by vinn · · Score: 3, Funny

    You can still buy Itanium chips? Holy crap. Are they found on the same aisle of the department store as the iceboxes and cotton gins?

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