Re:Somebody has faith in Itanium ... (Score 0)

SGI put their future on Itanic, and look what happened to them? they are in the doorway of chapther11. Itanium has become a small nische market. There are just a few HPC apps available except for institutions running their own code.

I've programmed the itanic, and it provides excellent float performance but poor integers, but lack of 3rd party software is killing it. Most people need integer performance more than float. Another issue is the unified 2nd level cache (both data and instruction into one table). If you can work around it and tune for the cache, then nothing in the world beats itanic on floats. The intel compilers also come with a shipload of performance flags. I have a doc called 'Itanium black belt compiler options' written by someone at SGI. It takes years to tune the code optimally. I've tested opteron, power5, power4, xeon and nothing beats it. Unfortunately one HP with a 1.6GHz itanium costs the same as a 2x dual core latest opteron from tyan with twice the mem, and the opterons have much faster memory latency.

We will probably test the new SGI montecito low end blade server when it comes out, but it must be dead cheap to compete with opterons. But only as long as both RedHat and Suse keep their ia64 distributions, otherwise we do not have anything to run the distros on. In the end it is the customers that decides.