Itaniums are very good number crunchers, especially for Nastran and other finite elements applications. However, in CAE flow simulation (like STAR-CD) the workload can be heavily parallelized, and Opterons win here hands down. Not because the Itanium is slow in number crunching, but because it is expensive and hot.
The integer performance (for databases, web servers and the like) is abysmal however. This is of course because all the decisions on how to distribute commands to the logical units have to be made by the compiler, instead of the CPU on-the-fly in traditional superscalar architectures. Traditional compilers aren't used to make those decisions, and sometimes you can't even make those decisions at compile time. So most compilers crank out lots of "DO NOTHING HERE" when unsure, and most of the time they aren't sure, since compiled code has to work first, and run fast second.
The worst thing is: All this should have made the Itanium processor simpler, leaner, faster and cooler. This hasn't materialized in the Itanium: It is complex, has up to 9 MB of Level 3 cache and is running hot. Intel failed, just like when creating the Pentium 4. Rumours say that HP saved Intels face by creating the Itanium 2, which wasn't a total disaster, and which is the the Itanium you can buy today.
They already pulled it off without animation, and it's called "The Matrix". Just take a look at the storyboard drawings at the whatisthematrix.com site.
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Itaniums are very good number crunchers, especially for Nastran and other finite elements applications. However, in CAE flow simulation (like STAR-CD) the workload can be heavily parallelized, and Opterons win here hands down. Not because the Itanium is slow in number crunching, but because it is expensive and hot.
The integer performance (for databases, web servers and the like) is abysmal however. This is of course because all the decisions on how to distribute commands to the logical units have to be made by the compiler, instead of the CPU on-the-fly in traditional superscalar architectures. Traditional compilers aren't used to make those decisions, and sometimes you can't even make those decisions at compile time. So most compilers crank out lots of "DO NOTHING HERE" when unsure, and most of the time they aren't sure, since compiled code has to work first, and run fast second.
The worst thing is: All this should have made the Itanium processor simpler, leaner, faster and cooler. This hasn't materialized in the Itanium: It is complex, has up to 9 MB of Level 3 cache and is running hot. Intel failed, just like when creating the Pentium 4. Rumours say that HP saved Intels face by creating the Itanium 2, which wasn't a total disaster, and which is the the Itanium you can buy today.
They already pulled it off without animation, and it's called "The Matrix". Just take a look at the storyboard drawings at the whatisthematrix.com site.