Sure, they have a great product: The P4! It has a huge memory bandwidth, better than the Itanium, and with a good compiler it can easily do 1.5 flop per clockcycle in double precision arithmetic (3.0 for single precision). This will give you 2.7 gflops in double precision for a 1.8 ghz P4.
Intel has a fantastic product, but compiler support is currently lacking bit.
The P4 is actually faster than the Athlon for scientific computing, except for the compiler fact, and this IS very important. The P4 looses to the Athlon simply by the reason that the compilers can not use the vector instructions properly. The chip itself is faster.
Why anyone would be an Itanium instead of a dual P4/Athlon beats me, it is supposed to only be a research chip and not really a production chip. It has less on-chip cache than a Celeron (128kb total)!! Sure it's packaged with a lot of sram, but still.
Intel tells everyone to wait for the McKinley, but just look where the P4 and Athlon will be at the time that chip rolls out in full production. It will loose out just as the Itanium is doing now.
Ja! Død over den angelsaksiske verden, lad os få nogle flere nordiske sprog. En smart måde at lokalisere Slashdot på, vi snakker bare hvert vores sprog. (This was Danish if you couldn't figure it out).
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Sure, they have a great product: The P4! It has a huge memory bandwidth, better than the Itanium, and with a good compiler it can easily do 1.5 flop per clockcycle in double precision arithmetic (3.0 for single precision). This will give you 2.7 gflops in double precision for a 1.8 ghz P4.
Intel has a fantastic product, but compiler support is currently lacking bit.
The P4 is actually faster than the Athlon for scientific computing, except for the compiler fact, and this IS very important. The P4 looses to the Athlon simply by the reason that the compilers can not use the vector instructions properly. The chip itself is faster.
Why anyone would be an Itanium instead of a dual P4/Athlon beats me, it is supposed to only be a research chip and not really a production chip. It has less on-chip cache than a Celeron (128kb total)!! Sure it's packaged with a lot of sram, but still.
Intel tells everyone to wait for the McKinley, but just look where the P4 and Athlon will be at the time that chip rolls out in full production. It will loose out just as the Itanium is doing now.
Ja! Død over den angelsaksiske verden, lad os få nogle flere nordiske sprog. En smart måde at lokalisere Slashdot på, vi snakker bare hvert vores sprog. (This was Danish if you couldn't figure it out).