Intel's Itanium 2: Succeed or Fail? 312
An anonymous reader writes "'Intel's most powerful processor ever has the ability to take on IBM, sink Sun, make or break HP, and crush or revive AMD,' says Fortune's David Kirkpatrick. But the 64-bit question is what happens to the heavyweight competition if Itanium 2 succeeds or fails?"
If it fails... (Score:2, Interesting)
I doubt the Dell server market makes much of a difference whether it is AMD or Itanium.
I do agree with the fact that we would see a rebirth of AMD, though I don't think it's really dead.
Sun might find some breathing room for SPARC, maybe a few saving graces for poor ole Sun who has been struggling financially.
The article's last mention is that HP ends its exclusive commitment to Itanium and uses some AMD chips. This sounds like a stretch, one gamble on a processor to stain a large business relationship?
Re:If it fails... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun are still scheduled to release the UltraSPARC-IV this year (at last report) which will be dual-core (same as Power4) and might again leapfrog IBM for a while.
Sun aren't doing that badly, all things considered, given the current state of the economy. We'll see how things pan out over the next few years, but it's too early to say Sun/SPARC is dying.
Why I buy Intel (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe if the people who buy Intel today are left behind by the Itanium, they will drive a market for stable and reliable chipsets and motherboards for AMD processors.
You buy them because? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's funny. I recall Intel being in the recalled motherboard of the month club recently. Between all of the problems that they were having with RDRAM and then with their SDRAM bridge chips things were getting really ugly.
Frankly, AMD's use of the Alpha's bus architecture for their dual-processor boxes makes them much more attractive. Dedicated memory bandwidth for each CPU is a nice thing. (It would be nice to see them scale up to 4 and 8 way boxes however.)
We've got a Beowulf cluster of dual-AMD boxes and the thing just cranks out the calculations.
Re:If it fails... (Score:2)
Re:If it fails... (Score:2, Funny)
I'd figure they would just stick with HP's own son PA-RISC.
amazing article (Score:5, Funny)
Backwards compatibility (Score:4, Insightful)
As Intel now loses its backwards compatibility, they also lose their biggest advantage. Sadly, the IA64 will probably lose out to less spectacular, but IA32 compatible designs.
Alpha tried to emulate the x86 earlier and failed. Sadly.
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:5, Funny)
Her favorite apps: microsoft works, netscape 4.7, and some kodak digital photo software.
The point: Not everyone has the latest and greatest of computers, the vast majority of the public is using our throw away computers or the cheap stuff from circuit city. They will still need to be supported.
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
A 64bit chip and memory prices at new lows, No doubt Microsoft is looking forward to a big lucrative upgrade to Win64, so that they can break that constraining 4GM limit built into Win32.
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:2)
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:4, Interesting)
After it was discovered just how terribly the Itanium was going to run IA32 software, Intel stopped talking about this capability altogether. From the looks of things, they've dropped the hardware emulation altogether from the Itanium2, though it may still exist as a (mostly?) undocumented feature.
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Backwards compatibility (Alpha) (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, I think that it was bad marketing and the loss of support from Microsoft (probably as a result of poor sales) that were the problem, not technical issues.
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:5, Informative)
If Compaq decided to go with alpha and continued to pay Microsoft to finish Windows2k for it(beta 3 of w2k for alpha was finished!), then they would be alot more popular in the server market as well as cad market. It was failed marketing that killed it and not technical inferiority. Infact untill recently you could buy your own alpha for $900! I saw it on compaqs website and its designed for hobbiest. Unfortunately HP killed it/
If paladium fills everyones worse fears and an alpha for 2k that can beat a 4k intel box that is not drm crippled and supports both Linux and W2k as well as old x86 apps, then I and a million other people would be in!
Infact I bet dreamworks and pixar would probably be using alpha's on Linux right now rather then pentiumIv's if compaq or digital got their act together. My hope is if it fails, that Intel will revive the alpha since its the only thing that can truly stomp on the competition from HP, SUN, and IBM. They already have optimized compilers for it which is whats killing the itanium right now. Sadly software vendors are scared as hell of supporting the alpha thinking its dead which creates a self fullfilling prophecy aka os/2 and macos syndrome.
For marketing the alpha as purely a server platform might fix this syndrome untill it becomes more popular and then the vendors will come back. Linux/FreeBSD are already there with apache and sendmail and Microsoft was %98 done with the w2k with IIS and Exchange.
Your a slashdotter and you should know the least quality products typically become standard over supperior ones. Thats just part of the IT bussiness.
Breaking backwards compatibility - why? (Score:5, Interesting)
In less time than Intel and HP took to go off and crack the VLIW/EPIC problems, other design teams learned to handle OOO, and do a very good job of it. They appear to have succeeded, and have a leading-edge part - but at what cost. AFAIK, the IA-64 is the most expensive CPU ever made.
The latest-out CPU usually does seem to hold the performance crown. But IA-64 doesn't seem to hold it that solidly, and there's question about whether the latest Alpha iterations have been allowed to fully appear - for fear of embarassment.
IA-64 looks almost like a government project gone wild. It has produced results, but IMHO horribly inefficiently. Pushing a more reasonable (not necessarily more conventional) architecture might well have yielded better results.
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, commercially it failed, because DEC were utterly useless at marketing anything, but technically there was nothing wrong with FX!32, performance was impressive, and it was smart enough to profile code at runtime and devote more resource to on-the-fly optimizing of frequently used code, while emulating code that was so infrequently used as to be not worth the effort of translating. If Microsoft were to market an FX!32-like product for Itanic, or even bundle it with their OS, the outcome would likely be radically different.
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:2, Interesting)
But i guess it's a good thing for computing that Intel decided to shift away from that x86 instruction set. The x86 instruction set was really bad design and not at all suited for all the pipelining that came rushing in after it. I am pretty sure the guys at Intel had to break their heads over pipelining with the x86 instruction set. The one fundamental principle of pipelining is a clean instruction set. Even all those textbook examples use instructions of as fixed a size as possible. And the x86 instruction set has tiny 1-byte instruction to 17 - byte monsters. Makes for real bad pipelining.
And so because a lot of people sell Intel chips and because a lot of the world is going to run on them, it is better they are really neat and fast instead of trying to prop up a century-old architecture.
Best of luck to the guys at AMD, though. a 64 bit x86 compatible chip. If they really manage it quick enough, they might lap up a significant market share, especially because there's really little software for the IA64 line as yet. At least M$ hasnt put in its Win series of hi-performance OSs
What I'd really like to know is: (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheers,
-b
Re:What I'd really like to know is: (Score:2)
Huge die size, massive thermal output
Designing:
Not sure, but EPICs highly parallel structure
can't be easy to design into silicon
Re:What I'd really like to know is: (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem though, is that it's often EXTREMELY difficult for compilers to effectively optimize software for VLIW chips. Since the Itanium has no out-of-order execution or branch prediction, these things have to be done entirely at compile time. The compiler needs to organize the software so that the chip is constantly being fed with data rather than having the chip dynamically rearrange some instructions if others are sitting waiting for data. It also needs to include it's own concept of branch prediction, suggesting which branch is more likely to occur. What's even worse (and which I rarely see mentioned) is that it has to optimize it's software for a particular chip design rather than an architecture, ie Itanium software needs to be recompiled for the Itanium2 in order to see many of the benefits of the new chip.
As far as manufacturing goes, that's comparatively easy for Intel at least. There they just have to put up with a huge die and extremely high power consumption. Not exactly a cheap chip to manufacturer, but manufacturing chips has always been Intel's specialty. Also, the high selling price of the Itanium means that Intel can afford quite a bit of leeway.
Anyway, long story short, the big problem with the Itanium/IA64 in general is that it's a design that is VERY difficult to optimize code for. It requires a very good compiler to begin with, but even then there are simpily some optimizations that just can't be done at compile time, and those situations will hurt the performance of the IA64 chips a lot. If Spec CPU2000 scores are anything to go by, the things from CINT (ie databases, compression, FPGA design, compilers, etc.) are much harder to optimize for IA64 than CFP (mostly scientific computing applications).
Re:What I'd really like to know is: (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW does IA64 really have no branch prediction? Surely that is data-dependent and better done dynamically!
Fail (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fail (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fail (Score:2)
So will it sell well? Yes. Because the sheep that only buy Microsoft will say get the SQL server and the latest verison of Windows and run it. Microsoft will have a version of most of their software that will run on it.
Personally I hope that AMD gets their chip out soon and has some competition.
Re:Fail (Score:4, Interesting)
It is interesting that HP's Longview, Colorado labs developed Itanium2, and did so untainted by association with the Alpha Development Team, which was sold/indentured to Intel. It remains to be seen if Intel will be smart enough to merge all of the technology that they've stolen, er "bought", over the last few years, and be able to field a saleable product.
As for the heat dissipation, etc., well, that's been a laughable issue for many, many years, and won't change. It should be fairly obvious that the more transistors you cram into a single die, the more heat you're likely to need to dissipate. Intel laughed at Digital's initial Alpha chips because they did indeed dissipate more heat than the '486 chips shipping at the time. By the time Intel had fabricated a few Pentiums (at 60 and 66 MHz, for the software developers to have a realistic platform to use to port their software), Digital had built another generation of EV4's, at a higher speed and about the same heat, by lowering the voltage. Intel finally looked over their shoulder at Digital, and realized that they (I) simply couldn't continue to build complex microprocessors with a 5V Vcc, and started reducing the voltage. Of course, when Intel did all that, it became _acceptable_ to have a large heatsink and fan in one's computer. The fact is that Intel copied a great deal of what Digital pioneered and then made it look like they'd invented it.
As far as I'm concerned, Intel's plagarism and unethical business practices rank in the same cesspool as Microsoft's. Unfortunately, as long as there are assholes like Robison in positions of authority (yeah, Cartman comes to mind), the rest of the industry will suffer for it.
I run Linux on an SMP Athlon (2xMP1800+) for those reasons, and many others.
Re:Fail (Score:3, Insightful)
I get the feeling that when you say "sheep" you are implying that they cannot be changed. I know what you mean. My boss is a Microsoft guy through and through. He got all giddy when we installed IIS on an internal server. He says, "We can use this. We can set up a department web page!" Nevermind the fact that he doesn't even know what HTML code is, much less how to code it. I tried to explain Apache, setting up a MySQL database, and even coding a little AI front-end for people to interactively ask questions. His eyes glazed over.
Some people just use brand recognition to make their purchases. They see the advertisements from one of the myriad sources these days, and whether they know it or not, they are influenced by it in their buying decisions.
However, it isn't necessarily people like my boss that will be buying these chips. Wouldn't the people initially buying these chips be the systems builders? They test performance before they make a significant committment to a product. Although there can be (not so) little things like contracts to uphold, I suppose.
How could these "sheep" see the light? Explaining it in technical terms isn't always the best solution, and anecdotal evidence is often dismissed. I found that a simple TCO analysis can do wonders convincing the higher-ups. We did just that when trying to go on leases for our computers instead of out-right buying them. We showed that there was a financial incentive to doing it that way. Money is something that everybody understands.
Re:Fail (Score:3, Insightful)
Once a "Free" alternative is in and works well (or at least as well as Microsoft) then they "see the light" and start rolling it out.
Microsoft cannot compete with Linux/ Open Source on cost. Even their argument of TCO is being shot down.
Re:Fail (Score:4, Insightful)
First, it's too hot and too expensive.
The people who buy these things know this and can deal with it. Remember, these are not crammed in like Mini-ATX towers (like the one under your desk). They're deployed by professionals in a professional environment with standards for this stuff.
Secondly is doesn't have any applications. I don't mean Gnome and KDE, I mean the sort of applications that big corporations run.
Big Corporations can and will port their existing (probably already 64-bit) applications to Itanium to take advantage of the newer / faster platform. ISVs are already porting applications to it and have been for a while.
Thirdly it isn't backwards-compatible with any existing architectures. You can't just take your binaries over and run them, at least not at full speed. Applications will need to be ported and retested. This is not insignificant in time, effort and cost.
See above. Porting will and has happened. If the logic can be presented that the company will either save or gain money by upgrading to this hardware then it will happen. It just makes business sense.
Fourthly, most people who want 64-bit in the corporate world already have it in the form of SPARC, Power, PA RISC and Alpha. Why should they change to an unproven, immature "jam tomorrow" architecture given their working and reliable systems already in use?
When the systems already in use are cost prohibitive to maintain they will be abandoned. A smart company will see the trend and start migration early. The Sparc platform is dated and loosing it's performance edge very quickly. The IBM Power series is still a reasonable choice. PA RISC who? Alpha who? You need to understand that IT departments invest for the long-haul, you won't see too many more shiney new Alphas being purchased not because they're bad but because C[T|I]Os know they're a doomed platform.
I'm afraid intel missed the boat by about 10 years. If they'd brought out a 64-bit RISC at the same time as SPARC, MIPS, Alpha and Power they might have stood a chance.
Or they could be going under like so many of the platforms you just mentioned. The 64bit world is certainly not new but it definitly requires some re-thinking in todays world. Intel is in a great position to do that.
I don't even need to mention how Athlon 64/Opteron will eat its lunch in the commodity sector of the market.
You don't need to say it because you can't say it. At least not yet. I too doubt that Itanium will be a hugh smash in the commodity arena. Not because it's inferior (I'm not arguing that either way) but because the money isn't there.
The companies that need and use 64-bit applications will not want those applications running on commodity hardware. They'll want a well supported platform and one that works time and again. Itanium can provide this. IBM can provide this. AMD cannot - they don't even make their own motherboards for christ sake.
Frankly, once a company has enough business to justify a 64bit platform they'll probably be profitable enough to deplay a good one - not the one from CompUSA.
Re:Fail (Score:3, Insightful)
I take it you have a vested interest in itanic?
The people who buy these things know this and can deal with it. Remember, these are not crammed in like Mini-ATX towers (like the one under your desk). They're deployed by professionals in a professional environment with standards for this stuff.
For your information I have a 64-bit dual processor Sun Ultra 60 and a Dell PC under my desk. I also run several multi-processor 64-bit servers used daily for building Open Source and Free software.
See above. Porting will and has happened. If the logic can be presented that the company will either save or gain money by upgrading to this hardware then it will happen. It just makes business sense.
What logic is this? How can completely recompiling, and retesting and reimplementing your infrastructure save money? It's not obvious. Please explain.
PA RISC who? Alpha who? You need to understand that IT departments invest for the long-haul, you won't see too many more shiney new Alphas being purchased not because they're bad but because C[T|I]Os know they're a doomed platform.
And why are they doomed? Not for any reason other than they provided the biggest threat to the (inferior) itanic, so they were artificially removed from the market place to try to boost itanic's position. There are a whole load of angry and dis-satisfied former HP, Compaq and DEC customers who are being forced to change simply for change's sake, because it suits intel's plans for world domination, and not for solid technical reasons. It itanic is so wonderful, it should have been left to compete on its supposed technical merits. I'm afraid this is a case where the politicians, marketeers and sales droids have ruined a lot of good technology and a lot of good business.
You don't need to say it because you can't say it. At least not yet. I too doubt that Itanium will be a hugh smash in the commodity arena. Not because it's inferior (I'm not arguing that either way) but because the money isn't there.
Athlon 64 will succeed simply because it is an evolutionary improvement on existing technology. There is nothing to lose on the customer's part. They can go on using their existing software, only a bit faster than before.
Re:Fail (Score:2)
Uh, what the hell does that have to do anything? His point that these machines are intended for server-room applications still stands.
I also run several multi-processor 64-bit servers used daily for building Open Source and Free software.
Oh please, now you're just shamelessly begging for slashdroid mod points. Pathetic.
Re:Fail (Score:3, Interesting)
You've noticed that too? I thought it was just the former Compaq customers who were getting screwed.
At my last employer we had 50+ Compaq Proliant servers on Gold service. Service and support started going noticably downhill from just before the merger announcement. The rate of decline did nothing but increase after the merger closed. It was so bad just before I left that they opted not to renew any support contracts and began searching for a 3rd party support provider.
Carly and Capellas have managed to destroy 4 good companies (HP, Compaq, DEC, and Tandem)
Re:Fail (Score:4, Interesting)
> applications running on commodity hardware. They'll want a well supported
> platform and one that works time and again.
That's certainly the conventional wisdom, but I'm not so sure if it applies in the near-to-long-term future. There's a great article in the Feb 03 issue of Red Herring that tangentially applies... they talk about the trend of companies to just buy farms of cheaper, redundant servers built from commodity hardware, instead of the behemoth workhorses of old... they mention Google, which is typically a bellwether for other large online operations.
From a practical standpoint, why buy (and upkeep) a service contract with Sun or IBM when you can get 40 P4's or Athlons running FreeBSD for similar cost and replace them with parts from CompUSA at your leisure as they fail ?
Re:Fail (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, if you're a Sun customer, like and use Solaris, you buy the low cost Sun boxes for the front end and rely on warranty for your maintenance needs. When you have an app that benefits from larger SMP boxes, you buy the larger SMP boxes and maybe rely on warranty if they're horizontally scalable apps, like say, app servers, running on 480s or v880s for example.
On your really large SMP apps, campus clusters, massive server consolidations, mainframe replacement F15Ks and the like, you buy a service contract.
Cheap Intel hardware isn't some amazing panacea that's going to replace large machines. Theres's also the cost of managing all those small boxes to take into account. A couple of reliable and available SMP Unix boxes can well be more cost effective than lots of little boxes.
Re:Fail (Score:2)
Things like Oracle RAC become interesting on Free Software as soon as the application vendor starts tweeking the Free Software in question. Oracle is doing that in the case of Linux + RAC.
Oracle's Cluster File System for Linux actually appears to make Linux RAC easier to deal with than it's larger cousins.
Someone evidently suggested to them some time back to deploy "Oracle for Beowulf" and they listened.
Re:Fail (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Fail (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fail (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyhow, Intel has the advantage that it stands on two feet in the processor market - desktop computing and server computing. If Itanium 2 fails, I doubt it will break their back.
Re:Fail - Nobody ever got fired buying Intel (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Heat - has been an issue since the 8087 and lower power products or improvements in heat removal technology have continuously become available. Even in current Itanium/Itanium 2 (Itanium Processor Family - IPF) products, heat is an issue but not one that is preventing IPF products from shipping. Over time you will see a significant reduction in dissipation in Deerfield/Monticito (SP?) but, in any case, solutions to the heat issue are becoming available.
2. Cost - Intel products are only expensive while customers are willing to pay high prices for them. Any time Intel has had competitive pressures, they have been able to drop the price to meet the new price point OR introduce new products that allow them to maintain their margins.
3. Nobody seems to understand that there is an IA-32 processor core built into the chips (starting with McKinley (Itanium 2)). For backwards compatibility, it's really an operating system issue more than a hardware/software emulator issue. When the operating systems are properly implemented, IPF will be able to run 32-bit IA-32 applications concurrently with 64-bit IPF applications. When Linux supports this, I think you'll see interest in Hammer wane.
4. I would disagree with your comments on the people who want 64-bit already have them. I would not disagree that there are limited projects testing out different 64-bit architectures, but I would be very surprised at there being any large server farms out there with the latest incantations of Power or Alpha and the SPARC/MIPS are probably looking for an upgrade.
5. Itanium is ideally suited for Linux. I agree with your comments with regards to Windows - but when you are upgrading to a new Linux release don't you rebuild/retest the application to make sure it still runs? In our Linux systems we have been able to port directly from IA-32 to IPF without any changes to application software.
I believe that there is a lot of opportunity in the market for a "standard" 64-bit processor and this is what IPF is designed for. IPF may not be the best or the first but they do have the track record in taking over a market and maintaining it. Nobody has made a lot of money betting against Intel and nobody has ever gotten fired for choosing their products.
Re:Fail - Nobody ever got fired buying Intel (Score:4, Informative)
The compiler requirements for Itanium are simply too high. Unless the GCC team has gotten some SERIOUS assistance from Intel, I would not expect the Itanium version of gcc to be good enough.
The real problem with Itanium is that it requires a remarkably better compiler.
No one will ever need more than 64bit. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait..I have heard that before....
Obviously I can't speak for you.... (Score:2, Funny)
the big question (Score:3, Interesting)
But I just don't see much buzz coming from the Opteron, unless they capture the hearts and imaginations of that "Workstation" market they throw right in there with the "Server" market in their roadmaps. And quite simply, to do that, they still need to keep costs really low. Slightly more expensive than the Pentium 4, but WAY below the 2nd mortgage Itanium II.
Personally, the second i find out how much the Opteron ships for, I'll make a decision on buying stock in AMD for a long term investment. If they drop the ball on this one, their new "away from chip making" strategy doesn't inspire much confidence in this investor.
Intel shooting self in foot... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully the Itanium 2 will be a reasonable success - for the sake of 64-bit computing, but I somehow doubt it. It'll go the same way as the original Xeons - where they were nice, but there were cheaper ways to do the same thing...
Itanium fails (to destroy everyone else). (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, fastest doesn't sell boxes as well as you might think, or True64 systems would be outselling the competition by as wide a margin as the Alpha outruns it. This is doubly true for "fastest according to SPECmarks", as it's a useless benchmark nobody but Intel marketing hacks and clueless hardware newbies pays any attention to.
Real world application bake-offs and value/performance (NOT price/performance) still rules the roost, which is why HP's PA-RISC Unix gear is still selling well, and why Sun is at the top of the heap, despite having the slowest silicon. (This is nothing new... since the late '80s, it's always been a step behind the other high-end RISC offerings in terms of raw performance.)
Itanium is shaping up to be another also-ran, to pop up in the spot where the Alpha and PA-RISC used to be. It might also replace the Xeon someday-maybe, when-if Microsoft gets around to porting 64bit Windows to it, and convinces its third party developers to do the same. This is doubtfull... anyone remember the abortion that Windows NT on the Alpha and Mips turned out to be? Microsoft is hoping for Yamhill, and they aren't above killing Itanium and propping up the Opteron in its place to get it.
No, under the "failure" conditions the article set, Intel will sell just enough of these things to turn a profit, and the True64/VMS/HP-UX marketshare will keep it afloat as a viable high-performance chip family. Hardly failure at all.
"Failure" for Itanium 2 is a re-launch of the PA-RISC and Alpha as a hasty measure to stem the flow of fleeing True64 and HP-UX customers, and a slow slide into irrelevance for the whole IA-64 platform, to be killed outright in a year or two. I see this as highly unlikely... just like I see HP and Dell putting Sun and SPARC out of business with Itanium gear as highly unlikely.
SoupIsGood Food
Re:Itanium fails (to destroy everyone else). (Score:2)
My impression is that Microsoft does have at least a bare functioning Win64 internally, and maybe Intel and HP has Itanium versions. I think they've been working on Win64 for over two years now, they started porting with Alphas because they were available and already had an existing OS and software for it.
IBM is the stalking horse here (Score:5, Insightful)
The POWER series, running RS/6000's (er sorry P-Series) servers has been eating into HP and Sun's market share at the high-end. It's not hard to see why, the savings on software licenced per processor alone is a huge value to companies when you can run the same app on a 24 processor IBM vs. a 32 Processor Sun.
Think about that for a minute. The initial cost of a system is one of the lowest cost factors, we all know and accept this (right?). When you start throwing in annual maintenance, support costs, manageability that's where the real costs lie. IBM is good at the support and manageability thing. I've worked with HP's Sun's and RS/6000's. I've got to say that the IBM support knocked my socks off. The major part of that was the technology trickle down from the Mainframes. IBM also keeps outperforming the Sun and HP systems on a real work/processor basis.
The other issue I see is that in the high-end Windows is looked down upon. People like their UNIX, real UNIX preferably (as opposed to Linux, except maybe in clusters) Oracle makes a good speach of saying that both Sun and Windows are their primary development platforms, people who have been around a while can hear the snickers when Larry says that. That is something that will hurt Itanium more than performance. (and it hurts IBM as well frankly) It is a big deal when your system is not the primary development platform of your software suite. If you're running Oracle or SAP on Itanium you're going to get patches and releases AFTER the people who run Sun get them. That's not good.
So in all, the issue isn't performance or 64 Bit applications, but what real work Itanium can do per processor, and what software vendor will support it as a primary platform. I can't see it beating Sparq or POWER (or even PA-RISC) in the near future (that being 2-3 years) on those criteria.
What *WILL* be interesting is seeing what shakes out in the mid-range market (between 4-8 processors) There's less issue with work/processor there, and that market has been all over the place in the last few years. That's the market that's really turning into the battle ground between all of these companies. I'm sure Itanium will play here, but without a dominant player it's tough to see how any of the players can leverage this market into gains at the high end.
Let's not forget... (Score:2, Insightful)
However, I will not buy any of them until they drop all the need for extra cooling. As if GeForce FX wasnt bad enough, you'll probably need giant noisy fans to run an Itanium 2 under 60 degrees Celsius. Imagine that. Nowadays, your parents are shouting "TURN DOWN THE FREAKING MUSIC!" In the future they will be shouting "TURN OFF THE FREAKING PC!"
Re:Let's not forget... (Score:2)
I just *adore* this extremism. (Score:5, Insightful)
But, the author doesn't seem to realize that there's more than just out and out success or failure on the spectrum. It's more likely that there will be incremental change. Intel sells X units to A, B, and C, AMD sells Y to D, E, and F, and IBM, SUN, and co. sell to whomever. And things kinda ballance out.
All this new technology that's supposed to change everything dramatically, changes things to the degree that it's touted to. My money is still on evolution rather than revolution.
Secondary processor question (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure this is a stupid idea that many other posters will point out the weaknesses of, but I'm wondering why it couldn't be done.
Re:Secondary processor question (Score:2)
In short, while it's theoretically possible, don't expect to see it in any sort of production system. The cost of such a design would be MUCH higher than a traditional system, while performance would suffer as compared to a signle chip system running native software.
Re:Secondary processor question (Score:2)
You could probably do this over any architecture that ran on a ptp bus like the Athlon/Alpha (They share a basic bus protocol), but not on a system that does SMP via a shared bus (Pentium3 or PowerPC, possibly P4). It would be non-trivial, due to memory issues though. The two processors would need to share a bus protocol, so likely the Alpha/Athlon combination would be the only doable combination.
Re:Secondary processor question (Score:2)
DEC Rainbow anyone? Had an 8088 for PC-DOS compatibility and a Z-80 for CP/M compatibility.
Maybe Intel could call this beast the Rainbow 2003?
Re:Secondary processor question (Score:2)
Re:Secondary processor question (Score:2)
Dare I say it (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, less power consumption could mean thousands or tens of thousands depending how many servers you have. If you're google or some other huge site with thousands of systems, the power savings means lower operation overhead.
Cool CPUs - and more than just one use (Score:5, Interesting)
And it's not only about power consumption. A lot of people have gotten sick of machines that sound like lawnmowers, and are going to the quiet side. Quiet is the new Overclock. You now can have a 2 gigahertz machine that only puts out 20 decibels of noise at 1 foot.
Intel is crushing itself against Moore's Law (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the trend broke in 2001 when people started to notice that the machines needed for this generation of software was not the fastest but the slowest machines on the market. That most users did not need a top end machine and instead could buy the slowest processor out there. During 2002, the same came true for lap tops. Now everyone is swimming in so much wasted CPU power that it is going to finally crush those that can't adapt to radically lower needs compared to what Intel and their competitors are churning out. Ask someone who runs a computer room and they will tell you that they are quickly consolidating old servers that cost $250K three years ago to a server that costs $15K and only takes up a quarter of the room.
Intel is in real danger of not surviving because it does not understand where we will be in 5 years. 5 years ago when they were in the middle of this effort they did not see our need for speed slowing dramticly and are now producing a chip that has such a limited market that it will never be profitable with all the investment that was in put in.
When you look at how a company responds to the typical S curve of development, they may make the first curve but often that screws up their timing on the second curve and they just go off the cliff.
Re:Intel is crushing itself against Moore's Law (Score:5, Insightful)
What we need now are even lower costs, lower power consumption, and smaller form factors. Active cooling, giant heat sinks, systems with five fans: good riddance. What we really want is the 2.4GHz equivalent of the Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore 64. Something small and reliable that lets people be creative. Something that boots in two seconds. Something that isn't an IT nightmare, as are Windows and Linux. Something that one person could understand and master.
An interesting question is "Will the current crop of lowish-end handhelds, like the PocketPC, catch up enough to subsume desktop PCs entirely?" Certainly the high end processor manufacturers have lost their minds and are designing systems for Boeing and the Department of Defense, not *people*.
Re:Intel is crushing itself against Moore's Law (Score:2)
You're talking about game consoles, no?
Re:Intel is crushing itself against Moore's Law (Score:2)
Sure, if you could use a console for more general purpose tasks. I know about PS2 Linux, but the PS2 makes a poor PC (with 32MB of memory and only has 8K of data cache, big tasks like compiling code drive it into the ground). Consoles are designed to do graphics first, second, and even third.
Journalist != Scientist (Score:2, Funny)
If I may quote the author:
Don't pay any attention to this guy - he gets paid by the paragraph.
-Ryan
Remember 1987 (Score:5, Insightful)
It is something of a question whether this change will open up opportunities for new software. I think it will. Think shared memory -- very large memory spaces being simultaneously updated and accessed by multiple independent processes and processors performing different tasks possibly for different users. The three drivers of technology are corporate databases, games, and pornography. Huge memory spaces with multiple processors attached have many possible breathtaking applications in each of these domains. Start coding.
Re:Remember 1987 (Score:2)
why intel loves Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
linux will always be best on intel CPUs, because they are the most available. linux is taking over proprietary UNIX boxes by Sun, HP, and SGI.
guess what, all those UNIX boxes used to have high-performance CPUs attached to them (MIPS, PA-RISC, etc). Now they are all going the way of the dino...thanks to Linux.
the more popular Linux is in the server room, the more likely Intel will be riding its coattails. And yes I know that Linux exists for other archs, but Linux/SPARC, Linux/PPC etc are always a step behind the Intel version.
Mindshare over technical merit (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the success of the Itanium not only rests on its technical merits but more importantly it rests with how much mindshare they can get for the product with the business people who, more often than not, end up making technical decision in a void.
I think that Intel is aware of this. Marketing can make the product. The best engineered solution does not always win out.
Consumer 'tanium (Score:3, Interesting)
CPU power has become a commodity (Score:3, Insightful)
Today, the OS has also become a commodity item, and niche OSes such as OpenVMS and Digital Unix are dead or nearing death. A hot expensive CPU cannot capture a market when it has to compete on a level playing field with cheap CPUs that run the same software can can be easily clustered or SMP'd to get the same performance.
The only way to break into a saturated market is to cut prices... does Itanium do this? I don't think so.
They may sell a few for the gadget hunters. But the notion of a CPU competing with IBM is so funny it's almost hilarious.
Who loses? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not because of market positioning, either. It's not something that will come on as soon as IA-64 succeeds.
It's because Intel and HP set up a company specifically to hold the IP of IA-64. Intel and HP don't hold any IA-64 IP themselves, they get it from this company. That way, the IA-64 IP is not covered by any agreements of Intel or HP, either.
This is no guarantee that 100% private IP is evil. Nor is it a guarantee that it won't be licensed in the future. Nor is it a guarantee that Intel and HP won't come at each others' throats with a price war. But it's a degree of lock-in that should be a factor in any decision.
This issue isn't mentioned in either article.
Re:Who loses? (Score:2)
The problem is that the Inanium approach isn't better. It's just different. The Inanium has lousy price/performance, which is what matters. There's no reason to convert.
And the conversion is tough. Everybody agrees that optimizing compilers for VILW machines are tough. Worse, such code tends to be optimized closely to the specific CPU, because it embeds scheduling decisions. So when a new CPU comes out, you have to recompile. This means shipping multiple binaries for different implementations of the same CPU architecture. MIPS machines suffered from that for years, and everybody hated it.
The Inanium is destined for the niche previously occupied by Intel's other wierd architectures - the i960, the i860, and the forgotten iapx432. A few systems will use it, but not many.
Itantium and the Fortune Article (Score:2, Insightful)
Mr. Kirkpatrick's article draws significant business conclusions - Dell will prosper, Sun will fail- from his analysis of the relative positions of the players today. I believe that most of what he cites as fact is wrong:
but I'm not sure his conclusions are wrong.
More precisely, you can't draw his conclusions from either his "facts" or his arguments, but that doesn't invalidate the conclusions.
For one thing articles like this become self-fulling prophecies and their prevalence in management oriented publications like Fortune help explain how Sun can be both a strong company and very weak share.
He may well be right on the specific issue of Itanium's future. Technically it's a pretty good chip and the fact that it's late and under-powered won't be important in the long run -the PA-RISC, which became a significant success, was also late and under-powered.
So will the Itantic sink? In my opinion Mr. kirkpatrick's article missed most of the significant elements in today's market picture that will affect this.
For example, the right parallel could turn out to be Intel's original Pentium Pro. As Intel's first completely 32 bit chip it was, briefly, a world leader in performance but only on 32bit applications. Since most Microsoft software used the older 16bit instruction sets, its performance on the Pentium Pro was terrible. As a result AMD was able to seize significant market share with its K-586 and Intel was quickly forced to re-introduce 16bit compatiblity in the Pentium line.
Years later the Pentium Pro came back - as the xeon - and that could easily be Itanic's fate too, if management at companies like Sun and AMD get their act together and make it happen. (see my article [linuxworld.com] for my comments on how this could be done).
Re:Itantium and the Fortune Article (Score:2)
Where can I get a "commodity 24" cpu box with 9G/s interconnects? Is such a "commodity box" board compatible with systems capable giving you a single OS image running 105 cpus?
Also, what boxes does Dell sell that have a comparable bus bandwith to a Sun v480 or v880?
The (clock) speed of the CPU is the LAST thing that matters.
Ever? (Score:2)
Was this posted by an Intel PR guy? Seriously, when is a new product by any company not the most power powerful, the greatest, or the best ever? I don't think there has ever been a case where a company released a new product and said that it was substandard compared to its previous offering.
Re:Ever? (Score:2)
Itanium? Yea, for Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
I still think that's true. Windows on Itanium is a terrible value proposition -- almost nothing will be native for years and years to come, and x86 execution mode is way way too slow to be cost effective. I think we'll see very little Windows on Itanium.
OTOH, Itanium is virtually ideal for vendors moving from proprietary chips/UNIXen to Linux. I was still fairly skeptical about Linux' chances back then, but I'm not anymore. Linux on Itanium is going to be a smash hit and will dominate the datacenter.
Windows on servers is ... iffy. I see the possibility that AMD's x86-64 will be a hit in that market, but you'd have thought Athlon would be interesting too and it was completely ignored. Then again it's Microsoft's only real chance in the large server market so you can count on them pushing it really hard. If they succeed then expect an Itanium with a much improved x86 execution mode; I don't think Intel will go the extended-x86 route. If AMD does not succeed then Windows is going to be pigeonholed as a small server.
Regarding other chips, only POWER looks set to survive/thrive, but only in traditional IBM environments. Sun is in the middle of a financial collapse; I would be surprised if we see more than one additional generation of SPARC technology from them. Fujitsu has a nice SPARC, years ahead of Sun, but SPARC stuff is such a bad value proposition these days that it and Sun are going to die fast.
Itanium is bad for non-mainstream languages (Score:3, Informative)
x86-64 will be very easy for compiler writers. My company's own compiler would take 6 weeks to port to x86-64, but an IA64 port would take person years.
It's the desktop stupid (Score:2)
Re:It's the desktop stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, maybe not wrong on the processor side. From the vendor side (i.e. the Dells, IBMs, Compaqs, Toshibas of the world), there's just no margin to be made. Services are the only places these companies make money on the desktop, and even that's a tough sell.
Now if Intel can sell decent volume at a decent profit, they'll be fine. However, if the desktop manufacturers can't make a profit on the desktop, then the desktop computer will become a commodity, and CPU prices/profits will fall as a result.
So Intel has to keep both oars in the water. Besides, this processor is FAR bigger than just Intel. Look at the companies who collaborated on it.
Relevance? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is, the CPU is just 1 little part in a solution. Intel isn't going to do any damage to these vendors unless they supply the entire solution, which isn't their business! To think otherwise is pretty dumb and a bunch of PR bullshit attempting to inflate Intel's stock value.
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked on 64-bit conversion projects for applications on HP-Unix, and it tends not be as trivial as it should be. I'd compare it to converting a 16 bit Windows app to 32-bit Windows. Yes, both should be trivial, but there are enough gotchas! On a per line of code, the Windows conversion was probably more involved, but then that was because it wasn't written as well - eg. assuming an "int" is 16 bits long.
RB
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:2, Insightful)
Not everyone has the energy to type malloc(sizeof(int)*20)
Bad coding habits are endemic in the free, Free, and proprietary worlds.
Good code will 'just work', bad code will need fixing to work natively.
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 64 is due out Real Soon now, and it's delay is likely at least half the reason the Athlon 64 has been pushed back.
Itanium 2 is going to have to make up for the pathetic performance of the first revision (Which seems to perform on par with a Via C3)
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:3, Informative)
The transition to Win32 was painful enough that the newer APIs are all written so as to make the next transition seamless. There may yet be a valuable crystal waiting inside the lodestone.
The proper plural of "Itanium" is probably Itania. HTH.
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, no. For example I am running 32-bit Solaris on a 64-bit UltraSPARC. And applications compiled 32-bit.
Whereas in the case of Windoze, the 32 bit stuff (and even some 16 bit stuff) is built right in to the API.
Yes, that's why it's called the Win32 API. Work is well under way on Win64, but in Microsoft's ideal world, almost no-one will write to the Win64 API - they'll target the CLR, which itself will be 64-bit native.
Then the millions of apps that people use, right now an excellent way to lock customers in, are going to turn into a lodestone around their necks.
Yes, just like when Apple moved from 68k to PPC? Nope, wasn't a problem.
I'm sure Micro$oft is pissed as hell, but Linux is going to take a huge upswing when Itaniums start flying off the shelves.
That doesn't necessarily follow either. After all, Win 3.11 didn't fully exploit the 80386 either, and it wasn't 'til the first NT that Microsoft did.
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:2)
So am I, but my understanding is that such a strategy will NOT be available to Itanic users, or will come with a heavy performance penalty.
That's AMD's big selling point: Their 64-bit chips run existing 32-bit apps better than existing 32-bit chips, but Itanic doesn't.
I hope they don't do that... (Score:2)
Umm, the CLR is for
I wouldn't like to see a CLR that was designed down to a level to allow things like DiskKeeper to work.
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:5, Insightful)
It's already happening, you just haven't noticed it yet.
Jon.
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:2, Insightful)
There have been articles in the MSDN about porting existing code to 64 bit windows API for a while.
I've perused them and there's really no major learning curve. Most stuff will just recompile as is, except for a few pointer hyjinks and some more esoteric inlined ASM.
Thing is, the same problems can apply to Linux and other OS code. Sloppy code is sloppy code no matter the social viewpoints of its authors.
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:2)
I'm not sure if the 32-bit operation in x86-64 and IA-64 work by mode switching, or by some kind of emulation. In any case I expect it's a lot different than the Win32/16 way.
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:2)
You are substantially correct that the reason why Itanium has not been widely successful is the there are few operating systems and software that take full advantage of the Itanium chip. It also doesn't help that Itanium CPU's are still exorbitantly expensive compared to Pentium 4 and Athlon XP CPU's.
Yes, Linux does support the Itanium CPU but does it support all of its functional features? I also think that the 64-bit version of Windows XP Professional doesn't fully support the Itanium CPU, too; this is unlike the 32-bit Windows XP Professional, which does support MMX, SSE, SSE2 and/or 3DNow! extensions found on today's high-end Intel and AMD CPU's.
Because to support Itanium's native registers requires knowledge of VLIW, I still think the Itanium will probably remain pretty much a niche market CPU unless someone comes out with a way to convert current IA-32 compatible programs to run in IA-64 mode really cheaply and easily.
Re:It's all about the OS (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002
Re:16 / 32 bit (Score:3, Informative)
The 386 was 32bit.
ChiefArcher
Re:16 / 32 bit (Score:2)
Re:16 / 32 bit (Score:2, Informative)
Re:16 / 32 bit (Score:2)
Re:Itanium gcc and linux (Score:2)
Re:Itanium gcc and linux (Score:2)
Intels correct target is DEVELOPERS, not large corporations with IT staff. That includes developers large and small.
The whole point of the PC architecture was the wide availability of useful applications from diverse sources. Restrict your developers to only those that can afford very expensive compilers and you've undermined one of the key factors in winning customers over to a new architecture.
Re:Itanium isn't backwards compatible... (Score:2)
BZZZZZT! Incorrect answer. (Though one I see expressed as gospel quite frequently.)
From an Itanium 2 FAQ [intel.com]:
Q10. Will Itanium 2-based systems be compatible with IA-32 systems? Will IT be able to effortlessly migrate their systems to Itanium 2-based systems?
A10. Optimal performance for Itanium 2-based systems will be achieved with 64-bit software. The Intel Itanium 2 processor does, however, support the execution of 32-bit code for ease of migration. Because compatibility is always also dependent on OS and system features, IT should work with their solutions vendors to validate their complete solution environment, including current IA-32 code.
In other words, your existing applications will probably run just fine on an Itanium system. The performance may be better than you expect, as well.
Re:But it takes twice the memory! (Score:2)
The 64-bitness of Itanium refers to the size of the virtual address, and to a lesser extent, the size of the internal registers. Datatypes in your program don't magically double in size. Even a float or int is still 32-bits, though there are compiler options to change that.