Intel Unveils Next Gen Itanium Processor

MojoKid writes "This week, at ISSCC Intel unveiled its next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed Poulson. This new design is easily the most significant update to Itanium Intel has ever built and could upset the current balance of power at the highest-end of the server / mainframe market. It may also be the Itanium that fully redeems the brand name and sheds the last vestiges of negativity that have dogged the chip since it launched ten years ago. Poulson incorporates a number of advances in its record-breaking 3.1 Billion transistors. It's socket-compatible with the older Tukwila processors and offers up to eight cores and 54MB of on-die memory."

Re:Itanium flashbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

I work with the world's foremost experts on optimizing for Itanium 2. All available compilers suck. If you are willing to invest the effort to hand tweek, you can squeeze amazing performance out of the processors. They are extremely memory bound (hence 54MB cache now on chip). It is usually faster to recalculate numerical values than to fetch stored results.

We work with large high performance computing systems/clusters. IBM Power 7 is fastest hands down for numerical work if you plan to use the crap output from the compiler directly. Recent Intel Xeon is as fast as Power 7 if you adjust all the fiddly settings and use some trial and error, but Xeon doesn't scale well for Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP). Itanium 2 wins by a bit if you invest huge effort. Power 7 would probably be fastest overall for numerical work if we invested the same effort into optimizing that we do for Itanium. However, we don't have to invest the effort for Power 7 to be "fast enough".

Re:Itanium flashbacks

[TheLink]

Would the same optimizations for the Itanium work OK for the Itanium 2 and for the upcoming Itanium? Or would the optimizations be too generation specific?

AFAIK the problem with the Itanic was the Itanic was better at "embarrassingly parallel" problems. But that meant you could usually get the same (or better) performance with two or more x86 servers at a lower cost... And the x86 processors would do better than the Itanic on code that's not been optimized by super experts.