Intel Shifting 64-bit Plans

OS24Ever writes "News.com has an article stating that 'Intel plans to demonstrate a 64-bit revamp of its Xeon and Pentium processors in mid-February--an endorsement of a major rival's strategy and a troubling development for Intel's Itanium chip' Is this the end of Itanium?" Looks like the rumors were true.

saw it coming

Well we all saw this one coming with all the delays on the Itanium.

Re:saw it coming

Wasn't Windows NT for Alpha "true" 64 bit Windows...

Re:saw it coming

And then there's the whole no true 64 bit windows yet

The tinfoil hat crowd would happily tell you that the reason there's no 64 bit windows is because Microsoft knew about this a long time ago and deliberately held off releasing Win64 technology because of some shady business dealings with Intel.

If you think about it, it's really very convenient for Intel, and MS hasn't bothered to give any good reason for the delay (especially when you consider that Linux has been available in 64bit land for aeons).

Re:saw it coming

As somebody who has worm a *lot* of tin foil hats...

The tinfoil hat crowd would happily tell you that the reason there's no 64 bit windows is because Microsoft knew about this a long time ago and deliberately held off releasing Win64 technology because of some shady business dealings with Intel.

I have to point out than Windows Server 2003 64 bit edition is currently a free download from MS's website, and comes with a one year free trial.

I have it installed. I rather like it. But, it's damn well not ready for prime time. It couldn't pick up the ethernet on my Athlon64 without some headaches. Lots of people are having trouble with SATA. There is no hardware 3D, even with the latest detonators. My sound hardware apparently has no driver support of any sort.

Seriously, it just isn't ready. MS is doing some respectable things with 2k3. No stupid luna theme, IE is way locked down by default, and it bitches at you if you try a weak administrator password. (it's even pickier than Linux about what it calls 'weak')

Linux is in a much better state. Fedora Core .96 for AMD64 picked up my ethernet right off, and my sound seems to work for playing, but I haven't gotten it to record anything. The detonators are still a work in progress... I hear reports of people getting them running, but I have no luck.

And yes, I really do mean that I wear a lot of tin foil hats. I even visited the Periodic Table Table whilst wearing one. I got into a discussion with Theodore Gray about the purity of the aluminium in 'Tin Foil' Hats, while I was at Wolfram research. I own a VAX, an Athlon 64, and I've made a pilgrimage to the periodic table table. Do I get a Karma bonus?

Re:saw it coming

The tinfoil hat crowd would happily tell you that the reason there's no 64 bit windows is because Microsoft knew about this a long time ago and deliberately held off releasing Win64 technology because of some shady business dealings with Intel.

Just because they're "the tinfoil hat crowd" doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong.

Microsoft has a long and dirty history of colluding with Intel in the interests of their own mutual benefit to the exclusion of the rest of the industry.

Re:saw it coming

Well we all saw this one coming with all the delays on the Itanium.

And the repositionings...

Besides the delay, the biggest mistake that Intel made with the Itanic was the idea that the Itanic was a server/workstation processor and not for the desktop. The whole reason that the x86 exists as a server processor is that it is cheap due to massive economies of scale and that a scheissload of software has been written for the x86. Because the Itanic is a niche processor, Intel will both lose out on economies of scale and will have a vastly reduced portfolio of applications written for it.

AMD has made a strong commitment to the desktop market with the Athlon 64 (and low-end Opterons), thus greatly increasing the market for AMD-64 software (which will need to include first rate compilers). They'll be able to spread development costs over a larger number of chips - which will result in less expensive chips.

IBM now has the Mac for expanding the market for the Power processors. Sun has the UltraSparc IIe and IIIi processors for the volume market.

Also remember that low cost 64 bit systems require low cost memory, especially in the larger sizes. Resonably priced 2 GB DIMM's have been available for maybe the last month, 4 GB DIMM's are still outrageously high price.

They talk about concerns

For "potential Itanium customers".

But based on their sales figures, it looks like they really aren't any.

If they had their heads in the right places, they'd heavily go after CT.

now all we need

is solaris ported to this baby and theres 64 bit goodness for everyone!!

saw it coming

Well we all saw this one coming with once we looked at the opteron.

(Really, it kicks serious bootay)

64 bits of nothingness

Until a 64-bit version of Windows comes out, I don't see this mattering all that much. 64-bit doesn't mean anything to the masses of end users, just the developers. I don't care if my computer is 2-bit or 1000-bit as long as it works well.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

I'm tired of seeing this kind of rubbish. People who do real work on their computers (e.g., engineers and scientists) need 64 bit computing. For example, the CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software we used at my company required 64 bit precision for accuracy. That would be painfully slow on a 32 bit machine. Not everybody compiles Linux kernels all day.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

People would rent time on huge (and hugely expensive) supercomputing centers; greatly simplify the models, knowing they introduce oversimplifications and errors; or, simply, not do the modeling they really wanted to do at all. A friend is working in a chip design company, and his simulations regularily run over an entire weekend, despite the hefty hardware they have.

In some areas (like climate modeling and some kinds of neural simulations), people can _still_ not do the kind of modeling they would really like to do, 64 bit clusters or not.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

So what did you do with all you had was a 286 @ 16 MHz to use?
---
When all they had was a 286 @ 16MHz, they didn't do large-scale simulations of molecules on the computer, or design airplanes mostly on the computer. 64-bit machines already exist, and the software to take advantage of them already exists --- people want to be able to do the things they do on current 64-bit machines on commodity hardware.

er...

all you had was a 286 @ 16 MHz to use

That would be one sad little lab. At the time the 286 was around, there were plenty of (dozens in fact) of scientific computing architectures vastly more advanced than the 286. They cost quite a bit more, too.

It wasn't really until the Pentium Pro came around that the processor architecture in 'mainstream' PC computing had caught up to the big boys. Since then, intel and AMD have largely been driving the cutting edge. This drove alot of them out of business, but even today there are niche markets who need serious I/O performance that intel machines don't deliver.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

You mean you are running integer CFD Code??

Amazing!

All the CFD Codes I run here I run in double precision floating point. (sometimes single precision when the situation allows..)

It must be some pretty funky code to be interger, never come across any real CFD code yet that is..

I mean, 90+% of the runtime of our CFD codes are spent in LAPACK, etc.. so we use the (nery nice) intel optimised versions (ASCII Red was not just a hardware project you know..) which do very very well..

Basically, I call BS!

If you are using some integer codes, then you are the only people I've ever heard of in the industry who are.. it must be very painfull!

And intel CPU's are really quite good at 80bit FP.. especially with the right libraries.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

These spoilt young hooligans! Back in the day when I coded CFD, we used 4-bit processors and strung them together by the serial port to make the necessary precision. Even then, it was in integers so we had to work out the decimal places by hand and type them on the end!

And we enjoyed it!

Re:64 bits of nothingness

I just did some work porting CFD code from IRIX to an Opteron system running Linux. The processor had to be 64 bit because some of the runs we do now require 15 GB of RAM.

I only did the porting work - I only have a vague understanding of how CFD works. So I can't say what percent of the runs require more than 4 GB of RAM, but I've gotten the impression that most runs require over 2 GB of RAM, which is enough to complicate things with a 32 bit OS.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

I'm tired of seeing this kind of rubbish. People who do real work on their computers blah blah blah...

Suck my ass. I'm sick of seeing pompus assholes denigrating other people's uses of their computers. The work that the rest of us do is just as real as the work that engineers and "scientists" do. My Ray Tracing and rendering would be helped immensely by 64 bit computing.

Just because I'm not modelling the movement of helium atoms in an excited state doesn't mean that I'm not doing "real work".

If your modeling CFD, rendering, cracking RC5, or rewriting HL2, the work that you do is REAL to you!

LK

Re:64 bits of nothingness

I don't care if my computer is 2-bit or 1000-bit as long as it works well.

I don't care if my computer is 100 MHz or 3 GHz as long as it runs fast. But the point is that a 3GHz computer will almost certainly run things faster than a 100 MHz computer. I don't know anything about writing software, but speed increases still interest me, and if 64 bit computing provides a speed increase then the end user will care. Even if 64 bit computing just allows for more than 4 Gigs of RAM it will become imporant to the end user in a couple of years when LongHorn XP Ultra-Professional demands at least 8 Gigs of RAM.

For the record, I use a Pentium I with 64 Megs of RAM almost every day.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

But the point is that a 3GHz computer will almost certainly run things faster than a 100 MHz computer.

You have fallen into the Intel trap.

There is an exit to your north, it is guarded by a man in a spacesuit.

You have:
- A wallet

Re:64 bits of nothingness

There is an exit to your north, it is guarded by a man in a spacesuit.

You have:
- A wallet

: look

There is a PowerPC processor in the corner.

: Get processor

Taken.
The man in the spacesuit fidgets uncomfortably.

: Use processor

You have no software that can run on this processor.
The man in the spacesuit laughs at your predicament.
A geek has also fallen into the intel trap.

: Look geek

He is pasty-skinned and bearded. He seems to shun the light.

: Talk geek

The geek says loudly ,"IBMAMDVIATRANSMETA".
The man in the spacesuit screams and departs the room!
The geek leaves the room, giggling.

There is something on the floor near where the geek was standing.

:look floor

There is a a rewriteable CD on the floor.
:get CD

Taken.

:look CD

On closer inspection you notice the CD has been labelled "YellowDog" with a marker pen.

:go north

You are in a maze of twisty processor lines, all alike. There is a lot of hype here.

:quit

are you sure? (y/n) y

Well, Duh...

Intel has already publicly admitted to having X86 processors with 64 bit extension in development. Also, take a look at microsoft, who refer to X86-64 as "64 bit extended architecture."

Everybody and his brother figured out long ago that Itanium is not something that will penetrate effectively into the desktop market. It's hot, expensive, incompatible, etc. It requires a ton of work to get code running smoothly on Itanium. Th only amazing thing is how long it took intel to admit that it had egg on its face!

Itanium is not being replaced

No, this does not signal that Itanium is doomed. Have a look at www.spec.org [spec.org] and look at the CPU2000 scores. Itanium is starting to kick some serious tail.

However Itanium is not a desktop chip-- its too big. 64-bit x86 will be a consumer product for desktops.

Re:Itanium is not being replaced

The worlds largest computer company is in the process of migrating their whole HP-UX line

Of course, to the best of my knowledge, * IBM [google.com] * doesn't have much of an HP-UX line, so I can't imagine this migration you speak of is a very big undertaking.

Will Microsoft leave AMD waiting at the altar?

I'm afraid that we'll see Microsoft leave AMD waiting at the altar for the Win64 OS only for AMD to find out that MS has eloped with Intel for their 64 bit X86 variant.

I doubt that the US justice department and antitrust will have any bearing on such a move.

Anyone else?

Re:Will Microsoft leave AMD waiting at the altar?

The AMD64 veriant of of XP is still in beta, the only thing that seems to be holding it back is a 64-bit version of the .NET framework. Though I've been wondering lately if the delay is not the coding, but some more political, along the lines of "Intel and Microsfot are proud to announce the first 64-bit consumer desktop. Oh and *cough* support for AMD too".

Too bad they introduced LaGrande first

While I would love to own one of these, unless Intel releases chips with CT (the 64-bit stuff) and not LT (LaGrande Technology - Palladium/TCPA "security" support), I will be sticking with what I have or buying a PowerPC (GNU/Linux either way). Hopefully LT will be optional like HyperThreading is now, but given that many of the "features" it enables require control of the majority of the market, I seriously doubt it.

Will AMD benefit?

Does anyone have any real reason to suspect that Intel will build CPUs that are completely compatible with AMD-64 architecture?

I am sure that AMD pays Intel for x86 and MMX/SSE licenses, just wondering if Intel will use the AMD design for the 64-bit extension. If so, I think we can all rest easy that AMD will be producing CPUs for a very long time, with all the benefits of competition for the consumer.

ps-- in case AMD is listening, I plan replacing my 1333 MHz T-bird/KT133A machine with an A64/socket 939 machine. Thanks for providing superior performance in the sub-US$200 CPU market for so long. As long as you continue to do so, you will always have a loyal fan base among us mere mortals.

64-bit rant [move along]

Same bullshit...different company..

Blah blah blah, 64-bit processor....billions of GB of ram....

The real question is have they finally dumped the stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?

I mean yeah it sucks to change ISA but this is what you do. Write a *free* backend to GCC for your ISA and have it merged into the tree. Then pay small group of Gentoo folk to create a port of Gentoo to your ISA.

Net result is a ISA everyone can develop for [re: audience] as well as an OS they can run on it...

Sure it would take time and money but in the end you don't make a bloatware cpu to run the hugeass x86 instructions with all the tacked on do-dahs...

Tom

Re:64-bit rant [move along]

The real question is have they finally dumped the stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?

I thought we settled this back in the early 90s, there is no such thing as RISC versus CISC. The x86 is not CISC, the PPC is not RISC.

Re:64-bit rant [move along]

uhh, with all due respect, if we have learned anything in the past thirty years from the success of windows, unix, the as/400 and finally x86, it's that architectures are the hardest thing in the world to change due to the massive installed base, and that it's usually better to extend what you have.

just look at os/2, the MCA bus, and now itanium. why would i migrate to a new ISA and lose all the software that I already have when I can just grow my current one?

and x86 isn't that bloated, and cisc isn't that bad. just look at p4 vs. athlon - the tremendous clock speeds realized by the p4's use of an extended pipeline (which is a risc-like optimization) have a tremendous downside - you lose a lot of time resetting the cache if you miss a branch. so for interative programs, as opposed to massive number crunching (and that can be addressed cheaper using MPP and clustering), risc is something of a dog.

finally, you can't say that the desktop is not important to itanium when the line between servers, workstations, and desktops gets blurrier all the time, and the largest growing segment of the market is the low-to-mid-size server.

high-end servers may carry a premium price and have a higher margin, but like lenin said, quantity has a quality all its own.

this is not good news for intel.

Re:64-bit rant [move along]

>The real question is have they finally dumped the
>stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a
>space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?

Ok, yeah, right, umm....

You DO know that RISC processors generally take up a lot more memory space for a given program, have more instructions, and are often more complex to code for, right?
(of course this assumes you know what a delay slot is, or have understood the pain of manually doing indirect addressing, managing register windows during interrupts, or managing implicit instruction skip flags, the joys of RISC!)

I thought not..

as for the energy argument - get with the 90's - everyone is using similar internal execution units anyway - this is a red heering.

Of course, who am I to stand in the way of fashion..

RISC in it's pure form has not existed for over 10 years now.. neither has CISC, for that matter.
It's about the same as attacking russians for being communist.. it's just not that simple.

The x86 instruction set and successfully covered the widest range of CPU performance ever, and is available in by far the most computers... I would suggest by just about any measure it is by far the most successful ever.

Of course, there seems to be a group of people who cannot stand the pain of thinking about their python interpreter running x86 code internally, or the fact that gcc is generating that for them.
I truly feel sorry for them - they suffer on while the rest of us just get-on-with-the-job(tm).

Sigh.

Compatable?

So the article doesn't really cover the issue I'm most curious about - are the x86-64 extensions (yamhill) compatable with AMD's Opteron or will they require different 64-bit binaries?

Re:Compatable?

From the article:

However, Brookwood believes that Intel will wait for the appearance of Prescott's successor, called Tejas, which is due in early 2005. The reason for the wait, Brookwood believes, is that the Prescott designs were complete before Intel had access to AMD's approach, meaning that software tuned for one wouldn't work on the other.

"They need that compatibility now," Brookwood said. "I believe that Tejas is coming so hard on Prescott's heels, (because) Tejas has the compatibility that is not in Prescott and Prescott derivatives."


In other words, it does seem like it, though no definitive word from Intel itself, obviously.

hehehe

I love it when companies lie out their asses for months until they can flip their strategy around.
"Oh no, desktop users would never need 64 bit support! It's just not something a regular user ne-- CYKE! NOW HERE'S OUR LATEST AND GREATEST 64 BIT CHIP! PLEASE, NO CROWDING!"

Itanic

Rose: I'll never let go Jack...
Jack: Are you smoking crack woman? I'm getting off this POS! You can stay with Craig! [intel.com]

RIP Itanic -- cpu buyers win

This is fantastic news. AMD 64's are outselling Itanics by a huge margin. CPU buyers are demonstrating quite clearly that they want a good migration path. Itanic was such an inferior design that Intel is now forced to build a chip that is compatible with AMD's instructions.

This means that we now will have another generation of chips from Intel and AMD whose instruction sets are compatible with each other. Prices will remain reasonable because there is competition. And in the 64-bit world, computers will remain inexpensive -- unless you buy that OS and office suite that end up costing more than the hardware, but you wouldn't do that because you know better, right? :)

Re:RIP Itanic -- cpu buyers win

Whatever, man. I have G5 and Itanium2 machines at my desk. The HP Itanium2 runs Linux and WinXP 64-bit edition (which came out last June). The Itanium2 (McKinley) is an old slow one that crushes the G5 easliy on everything (using Intel's compiler) by factors of 2-3x. The new Madison Itaniums are substantially faster (look at the SPEC CPU benchmarks). The Itanium is far superior to anything else out there, it just doesn't run x86 code all that fast, and the GNU compiler sucks on the Itanium because the optimzier cannot get the VLIW right. The Itanium is just ahead of its time. And most people are too stuck in the x86 mindset to even see it. CPU buyers lose as a result.

Itanium, or six megs of cache?

Stick six megs of cache on a Xeon, and if the Itanium still wins by a substantial margin, then I'll think that Intel hasn't wasted the last ten years and billions of dollars.

Nothing wrong with sticking a lot of cache on a part -- everyone would, were it not for other issues such as cost -- but that Itanium is better than anything else does not follow.

Itanium puts up impessive numbers, that I can't deny. I'd expect any competent architecture with that much raw die area thrown at the problem to do the same, though. There's little indication that any of the performance gains are due to the architecture of Itanium. In fact, there was an ISCA (?) paper by Intel which reported that major features of Itanium -- eg branch elimination through predication -- were worth a little if you hand-tuned, nil if you had a decent (intel) compiler, and negative if you didn't (gcc at the time).

Which is all just a way of saying that Itanium is just another architecture. It tried some things that worked, some things that didn't, and in the end does well because the ones making it can throw tons of resources at the problem. "Ahead of its time"? No, because in the future, the same thing will be true.

...Shifting?

Anyone else find any irony in the title? Intel shifting 64 bit plans?

Itanium - biggest chip flop ever?

I can't imagine Intel is even breaking even now on the Itanium on the production costs alone, let alone the outrageous amount of money spent with HP on what is looking to be a huge boondoggle. How much longer will Intel bother producing? What unfortunate quarter will see a writedown for all Itanium development costs?

Get MS off its ASS

Maybe this will help get MS off their asses to put out a 64 Bit OS for Non-Intel (i.e. x86-64) I have wondered why MS has drug itself so slow when they had an Itanium version some time ago soething contractual with Intel ?

32 Bit vs 64 Bit MS operating systems , TWICE as many chances for bugs :)

What was it they used to say?

No one ever got fired when going w/Big Blue

Check that...no one but a slew of Intel Engineers! :)

.::. "Come close to me, Klingon, and let me die with my hands at your throat!" .::.

Put the Itanium out of it's misery

The basic Itanium architecture has been around for something like 5 years now, hasn't it? And still nobody has managed to write a decent compiler for it. Sure, on paper it might be a very fast architecture, but if no one is able to actually take advantage of it's potential benefits, what good is it?

hey, who moved my paneer?

Old news

Forgive me if I get a little bored by this 'revelation', I wrote about it in September:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11668

And I followed it up a week later with this:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11781

Ok, people seem to not taken me seriously then, so I'll reiterate. Prescott has 64 bit extensions built in. They use the AMD64 instruction set. This is because MS twisted their arm into it.

The question of when they turn it on is more a political one than a technical one, and that I don't know the answer to right now, most likely because Intel does not know either. They are in one hell of a bind. If Prescott is 64 bit, why should I pay 5x as much for an Itanic again? Oh yeah, a marginal performance gain on FP code, but a loss on Int. Whoopty-#&%^#-ding-dong.

It will be announced at IDF, count on that. When you can buy it, good question. My guess is that it will be an inticement for the first Prescott/EE buyers.

-Charlie

(As a self-plug, if you read the Inq, you would know these things :) )

64-bit Isn't why Itanium is so great

What differentiates Itanium2 from any Xeon is not the register width, but is the combintion the revoluationary EPIC architecture and auto parallelizing compilers.

IA64 can speed through tasks that deal with 32-bit numbers and 32-bit addresses with great efficiency, and it will beat a similarly clocked Xeon hands down running native compiled code.

Xeon + 64-bit registers is no threat to Itanium except in the minds of simpletons who look at the marketing bullets and say "gee, 64 sure is a big number!"

Re:64-bit Isn't why Itanium is so great

Andy Glew (the designer of the Pentium Pro) on EPIC vs. normal architectures: [google.com]

"Yes, but the IA-64 EPIC is not a modern architecture -
it is a design by committee, with microarchitects who believed
religious dogma instead of thinking.

At least some modern microarchitectures have made optimization
easier than in their predecessors. Apart from some egregious
glass jaws (mea culpa), P6 was often less sensitive to optimization
than the P5. The compiler folks complained that their unoptimized
code often ran as fast as their optimized code.
AMD's K7 and K8 continue in this vein.

This is one of the reasons I jumped from Intel to AMD:
the Intel P6 is philosophically a lot closer to the AMD K7 and K8
than it is to the Intel Pentium 4 (Willamette, Prescott), or Itanium.
Pentium 4 is fragile, just like Itanium."

ia64 is dying

It is official; Netcraft confirms: Itanium is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Itanium
community when IDC confirmed that Itanium market share has dropped yet
again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all
servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly
states that Itanium has lost more market share, this news serves to
reinforce what we've known all along. Itanium is collapsing in
complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last
[samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Itanium's
future. The hand writing is on the wall: Itanium faces a bleak
future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Itanium because
Itanium is dying. Things are looking very bad for Itanium. As many of
us are already aware, Itanium continues to lose market share. Red ink
flows like a river of blood.

Itanium 1 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its
core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time
Itanium 1 developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to
underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt:
Itanium 1 is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Due to the troubles of Hewlett-Packard, abysmal sales and so on,
Itanium1 went out of business and was taken over by Itanium 2 who sell
another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to
yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Itanium has steadily declined in market
share. Itanium is very sick and its long term survival prospects are
very dim. If Itanium is to survive at all it will be among OS
dilettante dabblers. Itanium continues to decay. Nothing short of a
miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical
purposes, Itanium is dead.

Fact: Itanium is dying

Why not just price the Itaniums competitively!

If Intel would just price the Itaniums in the same ballpark as the AMD-64s, they wouldn't need to do this crap. If they want Itanium to have widespread acceptance, do what they did with x86 to ensure widespread acceptance -- make it CHEAP!!!

blast from the past

In the June 4, 2001 issue of Electronic Engineering Times, microprocessor industry analyst Linley Gwennap [linleygroup.com] wrote a column titled "Itanium Era Dawns" [eetimes.com] that said, among other things:

I expect Itanium to replace Xeon, but not until 2003, when McKinley and its successors open a performance gap over Xeon.

[...]
Changes in servers never happen fast. But with Itanium now a reality, Intel's dominance is only a matter of time.

Doncha love it when people get cocky about predicting the future.

This just in:

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Itanium's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Itanium faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Itanium because Itanium is dying. Things are looking very bad for Itanium. As many of us are already aware, Itanium continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Itanium is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its engineers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Itanium developers Mike Hubbard and Jordan Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Itanium is dying.

All major surveys show that Itanium has steadily declined in market share. Itanium is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Itanium is to survive at all it will be among processor dilettante dabblers. Itanium continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Itanium is dead.

Fact: Itanium is dying

Dumb Statements

Bottom line: Pushing 64-bit capability could help those chips approach the performance of Itanium. But that could leave the future of Itanium, which companies such as HP and Silicon Graphics are counting on, in limbo.

Now there's a really dumb statement. If Pentium64 provides Itantium performance at a lower price with Microsoft software support -- then switch! It ain't that hard a decision. You're not losing anything here.

And if P64 doesn't play well in multi-processing systems, then Itantium can continue to fight it out against AMD.

Good Chips Can Die

It doesn't matter if Itantium is better than AMD64, or Prescot64, or you name it -64. Alpha was better still, and it died. Itantium will die too because the other chips are good enough, and much cheaper. Intel will have to compete on price with AMD64, which makes Itantium a dead end.

So long IA-64

Its a shame. The IA-64 isn't all that bad of an architecture. The predication register makes sense and the speculative loading is important as memories lag behind CPU's.

The reason IA-64 is destined for the scrap heap is the price. Given that I do some memory-intensive things I wanted a 64-bit machine for my new server. I bought an amd64 box simply for one reason: cost!

amd64 is a clever extension of x86 and probably the biggest win are the new registers - that results in quite a performance boost. But IA-64 was just pretty damn cool.

I wish M$ didn't strongarm Intel. If the current headaches of the myDoom worm have taught us anything: architectural diversity is a good thing. I would rather there be 3 64-bit architectures out there (IA-64, amd64, and PPC64); heck bring back Alpha! It means that its one more stumbling block to writing virii.

FWIW, my amd64 box is fast and handles huge jobs easily. With a couple of gigs of swap thrown on it even my Lisp code runs fast (amazing).

This sucks, because ...

See, hearing about things like this pisses me off.

When I think of all the nice system lines that have died off because their parent companies decided "Well, we could just have Intel make our 64-bit chips, and then make money selling systems", and all the technically nice architectures that are basically dead now because of decisions like that (MIPS, Alpha, et. al) ... it's kind of depressing.

I mean, I wouldn't mind if Itanium had been more successful. It was actually neat to think of Digital's EV8 team building SMT technology into Itanium. (Is this the work that's been manifested as HT on P4 on Xeon-class machines?) Especially since EPIC is supposed to make things so much different. But ... it hasn't taken off. The real pisser, though, is to think that the dominant 64-bit architecture of the future might essentially be i386 with more and bigger registers. Hopefully at least IBM will step in with its POWER-based solutions. Man, if I ever get drunk and start bitter rants, I swear it'll be about processor architectures ...

Intel has trouble admitting they are wrong

Look at how many trouble Intel has trouble admitting they are wrong and following AMD on something. Intel is so used to AMD copycating them on everything, they don't seem to know how to deal with the shoe being on the other foot.

So far Intel has followed AMD onto DDR memory, after dragging their feet for a year. Now it's happening with 64 bits. Next expect to see it with integrated memory controller, desktop dynamic power management(like quick 'n cool) and hypertransport. I'm sure when they come around the technologies might be similar, but they'll have some other name for it. Hopefully, Intel doesn't try the old Microsoft embrace and extend.

So sad: the A20 gate lives another 20 years

Argh!
This is very bad news for a computing purist.
We get to live with the ugliest hack ever, for
yet another 20 years.

Please burn all CPU designs that contain the
A20 gate [win.tue.nl].

Dumb ass question

Will Intel's extensions to the x86 architecture be compatible with AMD's. Or will fat binaries that can execute in x86, x86-64 Intel and x86-64 AMD be necessary?

Times are a changing

Intel going to produce AMD clones? After Intel adapting AMD's favourite memory architecture (DDR instead of Rambus). Is AMD the new chip architecture leader? Will it be recognized as such?

64-bit importance

64-bit computers are a huge step forward. As electronics get faster, we will see huge benefits in functionality and speed, especially for algorithms that use a lot of memory and use maps (in 64-bit, these maps can be expanded and be, for example, 10 GB without a problem).

Large memory will allow to completely disable the swap file and the virtual memory, which limits speeds quite a lot.

Finally, 64-bit opens really good possibilities for interactive games...games where each object in the game is not a flat texture, but a fully interactive object.

CT == Copycat Technology?

Nice to see that soon Itanic/Unobtanium will leave nothing but an oil slick.

So?

So Intel is following AMD with a "me-too" product, which will perform worse with higher power consumption...

C'mon all you "alpha geeks" (snort) time to buy the better technology that's available now...AMD!

The Athlon 64s and Opterons are faster at much lower clockspeed, and run Linux really well! :-)

64-bit is already in Prescott

Intel seem to have already put necesary element in the prescott die to enable 64-bit computing when they want. At chip-architect they have an article with explaination of the prescott die. [chip-architect.com]

Can't Intel afford to underprice the competition?

Is it illegal for Intel to sell the Itanium for $200 instead of $20,000? I don't know the exact volume prices for the IA-64 chips but I do know they are not price/performance competitive with x86 and x86-64 chips.

Microsoft is able to sell X-boxes at a loss to gain a toehold in a market...why can't Intel who haven't been ruled a monopoly!

Simple answer: Greedy idiots...

Now they can wear a multi-billion dollar R&D, manufacturing & marketing mistake like a badge of shit!

You gotta give AMD lots of props on this, if the Adopteron and Athlon64 didn't go off as it has this would never have happened and an entire industry may have been forced to massively overhaul their systems.

The real clincher...

Is that the Merced core (Itanium) has only a 64 bit data bus, where AMD's Opteron has a 144 bit bus.

Intel's problem is that too much of their market is tied up in legacy 16 and 32 bit apps. AMD doesn't have this problem - they started off with a RISC core which broke down the x86 instruction set into micro ops on the fly - and these executed faster.

And once again, Intel is making the same mistake they made with the 286 - a 32 bit processor with a _24_ bit memory bus. Intel has consistently under-cached and under-bussed its processors. AMD's 144 bit bus on the Opteron doubles the processor's effective throughput.

Since DMA, processors have had to share the memory bus with PCI and other IO devices. Which means that something like a hard drive or ethernet card can effectively "steal" bus cycles from the CPU, resulting in stalling instruction execution while a physical device is doing IO.

Core designers have just about reached the theoretical limit when in comes to instruction execution efficiency. It just isn't possible to execute more than one instruction per clock cycle without adding parallel instruction units. Even then, interdependencies between instructions can slow the actual throughput down to the 1 per clock cycle level. Because of this, the bus throughput is now the largest factor when determining processor speed. And Intel, true to their tradition, has designed their Itanium with a 64 bit data bus - a design which simply isn't adequate for the high end systems for which the processor is marketed. The uses for a 64 bit architecture require both high instruction throughput and large IO capacity.

The only architecture in which an Itanium would do well is the IBM mainframe architecture in which IO units and processors do not share a common memory bus.

* - I know the McKinley core has a 128 bit data bus, but it seems to me more of a case of "too little, too late". And this isn't even taking into account that the _other_ 64 bit platform, SPARC, started off with a 16MB L2 cache (not 256kB as Itanium has!?).

Shift?

I couldn't tell from the article- is this going to be a left shift or right shift? Inquiring minds want to know to what power of 2 Intel is going to screw up :)

Itanium is like OS/2

Better than what is currently available but not backwards compatible. Intel will not make the same mistake that IBM made.

Confused over 64-bit Windows?

Does 64-bit Windows mean that I'll have to reboot twice as often or half as often?

IA-64 is Intel believing it's own PR

Intel has made the mistake of believing their own press instead of the market. The x86 architecture which Intel created has achieved such ubiquity and market prentration, and there is such an industry infrastructure around it, that Intel has lost control of the market. Intel did such a good job at racheting up the performance of the architecture that the volumes and infrastructure for x86 effectively destroyed all other chips or relegated them to tiny niches.

Look at Sun. They *hate* the x86/Intel, well actually they hate anything they didn't invent and control, but even they have recently recognized the inevitability of x86 and the lack of enough revenue being available for continued investment in other architectures. But Intel still thinks that they can dictate to the market and that it is Intel and not the architecture that drives the market.

It is just silly to assume that someone would buy the Itanium to run x86 apps slower and at higher cost than they can run them on a Pentium. As for running 64 bit apps, well folks already have architectures for those apps. Why would you move off your SPARC or Power systems to Itanium, which are proven, reliable 64 bit platforms on which mature (read as 'less buggy') 64 bit software already runs.

AMD saw the change in the market and did what made sense. They extended x86 to 64 bits and made 32 bit apps as fast on the 64 bit chips as they are on the leading 32 bit chips. We can use the same bus, drivers, OS's apps, etc and add new 64 bit apps and OS's as we need them. And the AMD part is competitive with the fast Intel 32 bit parts. Why not buy the AMD part now, use as a 32 bit fast processor, but be able to leverage 64 bit apps in 18-36 months. You get more value and future protection for the same price as an Intel 32 bit part.

It is very hard for companies, especially technology companies, when the market says, we don't want new and innovative, we want the same but faster and cheaper. IA-64 may have all kinds of cool stuff for compiler geeks, but it has no benefits to end users unless Intel can deliver 100% compatibility with 32 bit apps, performance of 32 bit apps at the same speed as the top 32 bit processors and sell the chip for the same price as the 32 bit processors, or at a VERY small premium.

1996

I remember hearing about this in 1996 when I started my first college Computer Science class. Intel and HP, two of the biggest names in computers with a market share at that time of 98% of computers on the earth using Intel CPUs or HP design RISC CPUs (mainly Intel CPUs) were going out on a limb and we would have great 64-bit computing by '98, then '99, then, '00, etc ... And we have seen a rush in Itanium chips in no area. Perhaps they work well in the server arena because they are 64-bit CPUs and can compete with Sun, HP, SGI, etc... but so can a G5 and an Opteron. So Intel spend billions on a failed project and will no doubt lose a lot of money doing it. I can't say anything other than "Intel and HP should have donated that money to kids that are starving in third world countries instead of squandering it on a loser project".

Intel wouldn't ditch Itanium...

...any more than IBM would ditch Power4/5 architecture, just because they have a commodity market x86 chip with 64-bit address extensions (Opteron).
In the 'big iron' enterprise market against RISC where Itanium is beating everything handily (check out the latest TPC-C list Top 10 [tpc.org] where Itanium holds spots 1,2,3,4 (6 out of the Top 10 are Itanium systems running a mix of Linux, HP-UX and Windows on HP and NEC systems), Itanium is gradually out-selling all of the big RISC opponents like Power4. Note that IBM is certainly not spending the money to put up an Opteron cluster (no 32-way or 64-way scaled solutions for it on the horizon) even if they got good enough results (which they wouldn't) if they can't beat Itanium 2 right now with the high-margin Power 4. No doubt they'll have a run at Itanium again this year with Power 5.
But there's no way that Opteron OR a 64-bit Xeon plays in the big high thoughput space, so people that assume Intel would get rid of Itanium simply don't know what they're talking about.

confused intel?

Intel's vascillations have convinced me to go with AMD for my next computer purchase. Seems a good idea anyway with the Phoenix/Microsoft/Intel DRM plans coming up.

Re:64-bit Performance

Actually, 64-bit computing isn't any faster than 32-bit computing. This is a common mistake made due to the surface facts.

In reality, 64-bit computing is possibly -slower- than it's 32-bit counterpart due to the increased bandwidth required, though smart engineering in modern 64-bit CPU's tend to work around this.

The advantage to 64-bit computing is, frankly, in the memory space that can be addressed. When you can address larger amounts of memory, you can make an application faster as less disk paging is necessary (assuming you have the memory to match). A good example of this are database servers. When you have 24GB of memory and a 20GB database, you can literally buffer the database in memory, this removing your slower disks from the equation.

Mind, you can do this with PAE on Intel's current 32-bit offerings, but I digress.

Ultimately, I think what Intel is -really- doing here is playing catch up on a modern variation of the "mhz myth game". Intel always took the hearts and minds of the average user, as a 3ghz P4 seemed better than an AMD processor running at 2.2ghz or a PowerPC running at 1.25ghz... even if in some or many cases, the "slower" chips worked faster.

Now, the average user is seeing the G5 at 2ghz, but a whopping 64-bits... and the Athlon64 chips at 2ghz, but a whopping 64-bits... and they're assuming that they must be faster due to their deeper bit depth. This is really nothing new. Sony has been doing this with the PlayStation2 for a few years now... claiming it to be a 128-bit system when it's really just a MIPS chip with a 128-bit vector unit. On this line of thinking the G4 and G5 are -also- 128-bit chips... but Apple just doesn't market them as such.

Intel had to act to counter this assumption, and the easiest way is to add 64-bit extensions to the P4, keep them clocked higher, and then win both of the wars.

Does the average user need 64-bit? No. Does the user who does know where to get it already? Yep. Sun, Apple, AMD, HP and even Intel's Itanium have been offering 64-bit technology for a while now.

This all comes down to marketing. That's it, that's all.