New Itanium More Powerful, Power Efficient 51
Heir Of The Mess writes "Intel have a press release out about their new Itanium 2 Processor. The new processor doubles the performance, and improves performance per watt by 2.5 times compared to the existing single-core versions. The flagship model triples the cache and can execute 4 threads/instructions per processor enhanced by Hyper-Threading. Transistor count is a whopping 1.7 billion. Triples the previous SPEC_int_rate_base_2000 record. Retails for US$3692 for the top of the range.
So yes the Itanium crew are still pushing forward. I wonder if this could help save SGI?"
So yes the Itanium crew are still pushing forward. I wonder if this could help save SGI?"
The ship has sailed (Score:5, Insightful)
The world has moved on from iTanic to x86-64.
Re:The ship has sailed (Score:1)
In other (disappointing) Intel news (Score:2)
Not good for an INTC shareholder.
Re:In other (disappointing) Intel news (Score:2)
Tom
Limited Scope (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, a well tuned IA-64 application can smoke the best offerings from x86 world [on both sides of the fence]. But a $3700 USD price tag may push people away. Specially since processors like the Opteron 285 are nearly half the price and way more flexible.
Tom
Price (Score:4, Interesting)
It might be worthwhile for Intel to find a way to drop the price enough to put these things into more places. Even give them away to visible web installations (like slashdot, fer'nstance). Get a bit more market penetration, convince some vocal people that its a good buy and it will start to take off. (I'd be glad to take an Itanium system for free for web service - even though my primary web presence is anything but big. Even better a couple of them to let my students use for compute bound projects.)
Re:Price (Score:3, Interesting)
But that's kinda the problem. The cost and the fact that's its a very niche processor will never make it as common place as Xeon or Opteron processors. Specially when both Intel and AMD are pushing SSE you can get a lot of the parallel SIMD like benefits of IA64 on x86.
Tom
Re:Price (Score:3, Interesting)
Has anybody noticed that the Conroe effectively kills Itanium for most workloads?
Re:Price (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Price (Score:3, Informative)
Or it could be the ia64 really isn't well suited to web serving.
The ia64 has very good double precision floating point. And seems to be very good at minimal branching / very predictable branching code. In other words not web serving. The ia64 seems to have the same problem that they had with the i860 in f
Re:Price (Score:1)
In the same way that all RISCs are the same.
FatPhil
Re:Price (Score:2)
You may have a point in that VLIW just isn't practical for general computing tasks.
Re:Price (Score:2)
This means your typical random access applications [e.g. desktop] do not behave as well.
IA64 is really meant for the case where you can handtune that 5% of the code that takes 95% of the time in assembler. Who cares if your GUI is inefficient if you're pulling 4x the FLOPS as an Opteron in your HPC application? However, for a web server where you are doing less
Re:Price (Score:1)
on the flip size, some media app, that has a small kernel of code that loops, is perfect for IA6
Re:Price (Score:1)
ya know that when demand rises, price rises as well. Now if they supplied more, or the public demand less then price would fall.
Re:Limited Scope (Score:1)
Superb for numerics, as you can hide all the latencies by using enough parallelism.
One where the compiler will save you a lot of hassle, but probably not be totally optimal as there are too many possibilities for it to investigate.
I'd certainly like to play with one. My bet is that a well-tuned FFT could be blisteringly fast.
FatPhil.
Re:Limited Scope (Score:2)
From what I heard handtuned bignum code flies on the older IA64 [doing RSA-1024 private key ops in ~500K cycles].
But when you pay $3600 for a processor you want to get the maximum benefit of it.
Tom
Re:Limited Scope (Score:2)
Re:Limited Scope (Score:2)
As an employee of one of the chip companies I co
Working with the hardware directly (Score:4, Informative)
We have seen a few proto style units roll through, but they have all had serious problems and are not running at full speed. The engineering group either cannot or will not give us a reason why these units are running crippled, but we believe it to be a chipset issue. Hopefully we will see the servers rolling through our manufacturing process within the next 60-90 days, but no management timelines have been released.
Here's to all those of us who want that raw power and are looking to pay for it!!!
*Won't disclose the name since I don't know if this info violates my NDA, but screw it, the public should know this stuff. Information does deserve to be known.
-drach!
Re:Working with the hardware directly (Score:2)
Maybe Cell...
Lots and lots of Cells...
Re:Working with the hardware directly (Score:2)
Re:Working with the hardware directly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Working with the hardware directly (Score:1, Informative)
What's that in football fields? (Score:2)
So does this mean that performance is 250% of the original or 350%?
Re:What's that in football fields? (Score:1)
Does that answer your question?
Itanic, the theme song, sung by Paul Ottelini (Score:2)
I believe that EPIC does go on
Once more, you opened the door
And you're here in my heart,
And my heart will go on and on.
To the tune of 20 billion down the drain until it smashed into a simple AMD hack of the x86 instruction set. Yeah... It goes on... Nothing outlasts the Energiser...
Sell off Itanium (Score:2)
Re:Sell off Itanium (Score:2, Interesting)
Secondly, the current Pentium-M/Core processors are decended from Pentium-III and Pentium Pro, so the thing they learned from P4 was that it was a dead-end architecture. I'm sure there are some elements here and there they "backported" to Pentium-III to make the current Dual Core 2, but you statement is not really accurate there
Re:Sell off Itanium (Score:2)
I take it you missed this [arstechnica.com]?
Triple the cache (Score:2)
Re:Triple the cache (Score:1)
Re:Triple the cache (Score:2)
I'm sure the majority of that is the cache. I don't have figures, but if you want an example, check out the transister count of a large DRAM chip. Sounds impressive, 'til you realize that very little of it is logic.
Re:Triple the cache (Score:3, Informative)
By comparison, an Opteron uses 113,246,208 transistors for the 2048+256KB of cache [assuming they use a 6T structure which I don't know for a fact since I'm not privy to the details and technically I couldn't say even if I were, so don't assume what I said is verbatim fact, yada, I hate disclaimers] and the 4MB Duo (total of 4096+128KB of cache) needs 207,618,048 transistors for its cache.
Tom
Bumber for Intel (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bumber for Intel (Score:2)
I think you might be surpised how well a dual Opteron would run a large database system.
You might want to take a look at one of these. http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4600/ [sun.com] It can be expanded to 16 cpus.
Oh and so far the Conroe CPUs seem to be beating Athlons but the Opteron is a different critter. It still has an advantage in IO thanks to it's four hypertransport channels.
Re:Bumber for Intel (Score:1)
If you were AMD's spokesman I would be cheering for Intel by now.
You can't spell bummer in the subject; Cheetah, the product name; dual for fecks sake; and you capitalize ram, a common word, instead of Opteron, a trademarked word.
If this is what it is to be an AMD fanboy, count me out. I'd rather be literate.
Re:Bumber for Intel (Score:2)
Itanium is the Vista of Silicon (Score:2)
Whenever you set out to reengineer a foundation, and you throw money at it in the form of more engineers, you are asking for long delays if not outright failure.
Re:Itanium is the Vista of Silicon (Score:2)
Once Vista ships from MS (ready or not, here it comes), it WILL ship on consumer boxes (want it or not, here it comes).
So that within a year or so after launch, most new PCs purchased will come with Vista pre-installed, especially after they stop selling XP.
If Intel decided to stop shipping all chips but the Itanium, most PC makers would laugh, and probably abandon them to use AMD.
So there's hope for Itanium (Score:2)
We may yet see an Itanium that competes but I'm not holding my breath for Vista.
Buy one now! (Score:1)
Itanium - A Long Term Plan (Score:2)
"Long Term" is an understatement (Score:1)
1994. I remember the day I read the article in computerworld about the HP and Intel alliance and the new CPU, sounded interesting.
12 years later they are shipping about 40,000 anually.
This thing is simply not going to take off.
Re:Itanium - A Long Term Plan (Score:2)
Comparing Itanium to x86 is like comparing an oil tanker to a personal sailboat, or like comparing apples to oranges. x86 isn't meant for everything.
Itanium - a niche product (Score:2)
Admittedly intel mistimed the itanium introduction
Mistimed? Intel had been working fruitlessly on it for 8-10 years when AMD finally realised there was an opportunity to pull a Microsoft on them (i.e. consumers like compatibility more than new tech).
Itanium's big advantage is that it is simply a better ISA.
Debatable. It really depends on the application. Itanium does have a nicely designed, regular ISA that is awesome for serious number-crunching, but the VLIW approach really isn't optimal for gen