Why Doesn't the Itanium Get the Respect It's Due? 668
happycorp wonders: "As in recent years the Itanium does well, easily beating x86 processors even at its low clockspeed (1.4Ghz). The supercomputer people are serious about benchmarking (no easily tricked microbenchmarks or reliance on closed-source
commercial apps), so the discrepancy between the performance and perception of this chip is serious.
With a single-CPU Itanium2 system at
around $2000 their price is already reasonable, and the price would come down
(and software would be ported) if the Itanium ever became a mass market chip. Having an affordable chip one step above a Xeon or Opteron in floating-point performance would not be such a bad thing for gaming enthusiasts (or 3D artists). So, the recent
article
on the
Top 500 supercomputers list brings up a question I've been meaning to ask:
Why do we see so many disparaging opinions of the Itanium processor (all those 'Itanic' jokes, etc.)?"
"It seems computing enthusiasts' sentiment is set against this processor, and its likely that it's going to be abandoned sooner or later. We'll be paying for x86 compatibility indefinitely (recall the Xeon has roughly
three times the number of transistors of the ppc970 for example; but we hardly get three times the performance).
These are a couple scores from the top 20, with the total gigaflops divided by the number of processors to obtain a per-processor speed:
| rank | processor | ghz | (gflops / #procs) | speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #5 | ppc970 | 2.2 | (27910 / 4800) | 5.81 |
| #7 | itanium2 | 1.4 | (19940 / 4096) | 4.86 |
| #10 | opteron | 2.0 | (15250 / 5000) | 3.05 |
| #20 | xeon | 3.06 | (9819 / 2500) | 3.92 |
Given this, consider what a 2 or 3 Ghz Itanium could do.
(fine print: I am not affiliated with the Itanium or the top500 list in any way)."
Don't get no respect! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't get no respect! (Score:5, Funny)
-I told this good looking Pentium IV that I have instructions that are very wide. She said true, but the pipeline isn't long. I get no respect!
-The other day I was doing trillions of floating point operations a second. My wife said "Honey, could you mispredict a branch or something? I'm getting sore." I get no respect!
-My wife finally told me that she's leaving because she's tired of my architecture. I said "Baby, I can change." Then I found out that she's seeing a Transmeta processor. I get no respect!
Re:Don't get no respect! (Score:5, Insightful)
The compiler has to do a LOT of work to pack instructions in to the VLIW(Very long instruction word). To get max performance I think you need to schedule 4? instructions in each word. You can do that with carefully written vectorizable Fortran with the help of a talented supercomputing class code tuner.
When you get to C and C++ it is nearly impossible. Pointers and pointer aliasing completely frustrate the compiler, and in general most C and C++ code don't have the vectorized nature of the class vectorized Fortran codes.
The IA32 emulation is inherently much slower than a Pentium or Athlon at the same clock and they have much higher clocks than the Itanic. So any application you carry a binary over from an IA32 box is a real dog. It takes advantage of none of the chips strengths and hits all its weaknesses.
IA64 has a place on some supercomputing applications that exloit its strenghts. On others I wager x386_64 is both cheaper(higher sales volume and easier to manufacture), faster and easier to develop code for. On any C or C++ code IA32 and x86_64 will win hands down.
With Itanium Intel was betting bumping up the clock on chips would run out of gas sooner than it did. They thought you would have to go to VLIW to keep increasing performance. Unfortunately clocks kept going up enough that the high end AMD and Penitum left it in the dust. AMD also developed x86_64 which gave people 64 bit address space which is needed for some apps, but PC prices and high clocks.
IA64 is doomed in any place other than niche supercomputing apps and its struggling there against Power, x86_64 etc.
Re:Don't get no respect! (Score:4, Interesting)
You just need to read the other posts here about how hard it is to develop compilers that can find 4 way parallel instructions to cram in to the VLIW at compile time. You find a lot more opportunities at runtime using dynamic scheduling at the price of complexity in the CPU.
Maybe someday the compilers will be really good and Pentirum/AMD CPU clocks will hit the wall and Itanic will reign supreme. Intel is one of the few companies with pockets deep enough to keep it alive and keep pouring the billions in to both the CPU and the compiler, until it starts outshining x86_64 on anything other than vectorizable Fortran. Wouldn't necessarily count on that confluence of events happening in time to save it. I'd really like to see how much Intel has sunk in to Itanic versus the ROI. It must be appalling. Only a company with a near monopoly elsewhere could survive it.
Me I'll take an AMD 3400+. My whole computer cost $800 versus $2000 for just an Itanic CPU, it has 2 GB/sec memory bandwidth, runs IA32 apps really fast, is running Gentoo Linux so everything is taking advantage of all the new registers and instructions set improvements, and I have 64 bit addressing. Its sweet and sensible.
I'm not argueing that Itanic wont hold its niche in supercomputing. Aren't many people who are going to put one on a desktop or in a server.
The whole article (ICOS) (Score:5, Informative)
The chipmaker has released two new Itaniums for two-processor servers as part of its effort to eliminate price premiums on the chip.
Intel announced on Monday two new Itanium processors for two-processor servers, another step in the company's efforts to eliminate price as a barrier to Itanium acceptance.
The 1.4GHz Itanium 2 with 3MB of cache is designed for servers in clusters. The new chip will provide about 25 percent more performance and cost much less than the initial Itanium optimised for clusters, which came out last year, said Jason Waxman, director of multiprocessor platform marketing at Intel.
The second new chip, a 1.6GHz Itanium 2 with 3MB of cache, is optimised for higher performance in general-use two-processor servers, he said.
Waxman reiterated that Intel is working on several technologies that will eliminate any price premium on Itanium by 2007 and thereby allow its performance advantages to, hopefully, blossom.
"The price/performance balance will be heavily in favour of Itanium," Waxman said.
With the focus on price, the Itanium melodrama is once again reaching a turning point. After several years of delays, the chip family debuted in 2001 to poor reviews and negligible customer acceptance. A second version of the chip that appeared in 2002 dramatically improved performance but failed to spark the market.
Itanium finally began to gain acceptance in 2003 with Madison, a new version of Itanium 2 that substantially improved performance again and lowered the cost. Intel shipped about 100,000 Itaniums in 2003, compared with only around a few thousand for the first two years. Itanium volume is expected to double this year, chief executive Craig Barrett said in February.
But in 2004, Intel announced that it would come out with a version of its Xeon chip that runs both 32- and 64-bit code. Xeon and Pentium chips typically run 32-bit code. Itanium runs 64-bit code, which, among other advantages, lets a computer maker pack far more memory into a computer.
Itanium, however, requires completely different software to work well, a factor that has hindered adoption. Part of the appeal of the Opteron chip is that it can handle larger memory loads in 64-bit mode on essentially the same software base.
Lowering the cost of Itanium servers won't eliminate the software issue, but it will begin to create an environment in which greater acceptance could occur, which in turn could cause software developers to gravitate to Itanium. Analysts and PC makers have viewed this theory with various doses of scepticism, but the range of opinion is generally substantially less negative than it was 18 months ago.
Price drops have already had some effect. In 2002, a two-processor Itanium server cost about $18,000 (£9,859). With the new chips, a similarly configured system can sell for less than $8,000, while basic one-processor Itanium servers will go for just more than $2,000.
Some of these price cuts have come as a result of Moore's Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months. But Intel has also expanded its product line to better suit the economic realities of two-processor servers. The company also designs and partly manufacturers many of the Itanium servers on the market, which cuts independent engineering costs.
To lower the price further, Intel will begin to create products and add features to Itanium so that Itanium servers can be made out of many of the same components as Xeon servers. In 2005 and 2006, Itanium servers will be able to use the same memory or other components of Xeon servers, Waxman said.
In 2005, Intel will also come out with two different chipsets for Montecito, the next major version of the chip. One chipset will wring maximum performance out of the chip, Waxman said, while the other will allow server makers to insert Montecito into their Madison-based servers, thereby cutting down independent design efforts.
By 2007, Intel will
compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:compatibility (Score:4, Informative)
However, if your running a 32bit OS on a 64bit machine, something is not right.
Re:compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:compatibility (Score:5, Funny)
"Windows is a 32-bit extension to a 16-bit graphical shell for an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition."
Re:compatibility (Score:4, Informative)
The intel 386 cpu was a 32 bit platform.
The joke was derived from this...
Re:compatibility (Score:5, Informative)
But to return to seriousness again for a moment, the Itanium isn't pitched at mainstream anymore, and it's debatable whether it ever was. It's an entirely new ISA -- and a very good one at that -- and software developers just didn't see a good reason to jump on it when cheap x86 CPU's were selling like hotcakes.
Intel would've loved to have forced the entire industry to move to IA64 years ago. If it had done so before the Athlon XP ever hit the scene, it's possible the chip giant could have pulled it off. However, with the advent of the Athlon XP (and MP's as well), if Intel abandoned x86, AMD would be there to pick up the pieces, giving customers the option of (a) continued use of their paid-for apps and paid-for OS's on a cheap, fast, x86 chip or (b) loss of all practical use of your 32-bit apps and OS's, total rewrites and recompilations of all core software bits, all on a $2,000 CPU. It's quite clear why Intel didn't try to do such a stupid thing.
So, on the one hand, we can thank AMD for giving us cheap, fast CPU's that run pretty much whatever you want these days. On the other hand, we can thank AMD for keeping us stuck on x86 to begin with, for without AMD we'd almost certainly all be on IA64 today. But, since I like competition, I can say I'm extremely glad things turned out the way they did. IA64 would've been the death-knell for AMD and any other kind of competition, and Intel would be milking us for all we're worth today if it could.
Re:compatibility (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:compatibility (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:compatibility (Score:3, Informative)
That's all well and good if you're a government researcher with access to an Itanium-based supercomputer. But the rest of us don't spend our time testing nuclear warheads; we're just reading email, surfing the web, working on office documents, etc. T
Re:compatibility (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, and the speed sucks ass. Even Intel recommends against running any 32bit code on the Itaniums.
I think the reason it's not doing as well as they hoped, and compared to the benchmarks, is because, in real-world performance, they're not that great. We've got 13 itanium boxes in house, all of them cost huge $ (we can't get the cheaper low-power ones, we need speed above all else) and their usage levels over the last few months has bottomed out.
Re:compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
I think AMD has clearly won the market in terms of the consumer 64bit processor. And I can buy a double-core AMD today but I couldn't get a double-core Intel offering for a good price.
Re:compatibility (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell us again why doubling the number of registers (which is what AMD64 does in 64-bit mode) is such a bad thing?
Remember, AMD didn't do what Intel did in 1985 and just strech the registers, without adding any.
Re:compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh well, I love AMD for their work, but I really think they barked up the wrong tree. I would have supported whole heartedly an implementation of PPC 64-bit or even some grounded up archetecture just as much as I supported Itanium, but they decided to go the cheapest route, faking it for the sake of performance.
So what did AMD fake? The designed a 64 Bit processor with full backwards support to 32Bit code. That's nothing intel didn't do before remember 16/32Bit?
Also AMD Opteron technology was designed by some of the brightest people to ever come out of DEC. These are the guys that designed Alpha. In fact there are designs for the next generation Alpha that would compete with anything currently out there. Compaq just couldn't afford to pay the large cost of converting the FAB.
Re:compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Hand optimized assembly will give you screaming fast results. Unfortunately, you can't build modern applications that way and you end up having to rely on the compiler to optimize for you. On the x86, the compilers are amazingly efficient these days by contrast.
If you've got a 64 bit database, and a 64 bit OS and a 64 bit middleware, what more do you need? You don't need to run photoshop on it. Compatibility is only marginally an issue on servers.
Re:compatibility (Score:3)
1. It was slower than a P3 running 32 bit code.
2. Required a "brilliant" compiler to get good speed.
3. Half hearted windows support.
So it became a bit player for thoses that needed really fast floating point and that would write custom software to get it.
Motherboard sources (Score:3, Interesting)
It could be my information is out of date, but I don't believe Intel has made their own motherboards for years. It's just not cost-effective. Rather, they give specifications for boards and 3rd-party manufaturers then fabtricate their own varieties. Or at least that was the way it was when I co-oped with them. *wry grin* I always wondered how much they saved after the costs of bad publicity due to bad implementations. Amazingly
Re:Motherboard sources (Score:3, Insightful)
http://intel.com/support/motherboards/server/ [intel.com]
Re:compatibility (Score:3, Insightful)
It is true for processors as it is for people... (Score:5, Funny)
Brand issues? (Score:4, Insightful)
They just aren't the juggernaut they used to be. There was a time when they built it and people came. I presume choice is what's keeping the sales down.
Follow the herd! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because people repeat what they hear. Many people here only know what has been said on Slashdot about the Itanium. They've never used one. MrDicker64 said it was crap, so it must be!
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Funny)
Wait...
*brain asplodes*
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked at a startup that was building a database ~70 gigs in size. It took 2 months to build said database. Lots and lots of very small lookups and inserts.
Memory was our bottleneck. More ram equals more speed. So we spent BIG bucks and bought a quad Itanium with 12 or 16 gigs of memory (I forget exactly how much it had).
The Itanium was slower than a dual X86 with 2 gigs of memory! And not just a little slower. We spent weeks trying to get the database optimized.
Why does no one respect the Itaniums? Intel made a slow chip. Then they released the sequel. I've already paid my dues on that line once. I'm not playing this round.
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:4, Insightful)
Your anecdote probably has little to do with the current processor.
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't blame Itanium that you picked the wrong chip for your needs. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation could have saved you a lot of money. With your 70 gb database and 2 gb of ram, assuming there wasn't much locality in the lookups you have about a 2.85% chance that your next lookup is already in memory. Up it to 12 gb and you have 17.14% - still not much, so either way your main bottleneck is going to be the bandwidth of your memory system. There was no secret that the first batch of Itaniums used 133 MHz RAM while DDR ram for x86 was up to 266 or maybe even 333 MHz by that time. Itanium's niche has always been floating-point intensive applications, which yours was not.
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's got 2 xeons and 4 GB of ram!
It sounds great to management.
As my colleague noted above, db operations are IO bound. This means you have to get data from point a to point b very quickly, whether from memory or disk.
To do that job you need high memory and system bus clock speeds, so there is no vaccuum happening at the cpu in.
There is a point of diminishing returns with adding memory. Sometimes adding too much memory can slow things down, considerably.
The CAS latency increases as does the latency due to memory management overhead.
With a db you face the same exact issue that professional audio engineers do. Getting lots of data to the cpu, and back out somewhere.
Anecdote:
my buddy, a pro dj, got a dual xeon 2.4 Ghz (I think it was) 4GB memory for producing music. at around 47 audio streams, snap crackle pop. cpu usage was around 10% or so. It was a 12000 dollar mistake on his part.
I walked in with a $700 amd 64 3200+ (thats 2Ghz) with 1/4 of the memory, one cpu, and I loaded up a project with 134 audio streams and it played like butter.
Both were running windows xp 32, both were running Steinberg Cubase SX.
Xeon specs:
FSB 533
DDR 133 on 4 1GB sticks
AMD 64 spec:
FSB 800
DDR 400 on 1 1GB stick
Read the specs for VIA K8T800 chipset and compare it to any Xeon chipset. This time period was a year ago Christmas. Read up on how the memory architecture works for both CPU's.
Database tests were similar. Just about any IO bound process will produce a similar result. Music, video, db, etc.
It isn't that the xeon sucks, it's a computations per second centric architecture. Unfortunately for intel, they focused on clock speed when they should have been removing architecture bottlenecks which would allow people to take advantage of all those cycles. The G5 has similar issues but not as bad.
It's all about the memory and bus architecture... The sad uninformed people say (pinch airflow from nose so you sound geeky) "It's a 64 bit processor, you need a 64 bit OS to take advantage of it, period".
What they fail to realize is the 64 bit memory and bus architecture happen *below the HAL*. the OS doesn't even see it, let alone need to be 64 bit to take advantage of it. I politely let them flap their gums and went out and bought one anyway, then proved them wrong.
Computationally = intel, tho that gap is narrowing
IO = AMD64 or opteron.
I don't care if you are running windows 95, amd64 will be faster for IO bound stuff, than any 32 bit architecture is capable of even getting close to.
If you are crunching spreadsheets, word processing or videogaming, *generally*, intel is better, tho that gap is getting smaller. It will likely disappear when 64 bit OS's get apps caught up to them.
For DB, working with large files, shunting lots of streams around the mobo, AMD 64 *smokes* intel 32 right now, 32 bit apps notwithstanding. There is simply no contest.
l8,
AC
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Insightful)
You only need to know three things about the Itanium to pretty much automatically rule it out:
1) Heat (and the related, power consumption). Not a joke, not a rumor. The Itanium makes the Prescott core look cool and energy-efficient by comparison.
2) Not designed to run the software in use by 99.5% of the PC market. Great for a custom supercomputer, okay for some servers, complete shit for normal desktop use.
3) Price. They hope to make it competitive by 2007? How long has it existed now, at 3-10x the price of the highest end x86 CPU? And someone actually needs to ask why it hasn't hit mainstream use yet?
That about does it for me, anyway. Did I miss something obvious here? I don't see this as a case of the rumor mill damning it, just its own HUGE shortcomings to offset its single good point (namely, good performance for a very limited set of uses).
Re:Follow the herd! (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is and will remain that you don't get enough performance for what you pay for from Itanium.
When I can build a Athlon64 X2 cluster for under $500,000 that can place somewhere around 150 on the top 500 list. It's hard for itanium to compete pricewise.
Itanium2 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Itanium2 (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I had that class.
Re:Itanium2 (Score:5, Funny)
I recognize all of the words, but it still doesn't make sense.
Re:Itanium2 (Score:5, Insightful)
The VLIW architecture is beautiful in many ways, but creating a compiler that creates fast code for an in-order VLIW processor is a seriously difficult undertaking.
No x86 Compat is the Achilles' Heel (Score:5, Insightful)
Early versions also had problems with heat. Where I work we have some Itanic workstations and in the winter, if we were chilly, we literally turned them on to help warm up our offices.
Re:No x86 Compat is the Achilles' Heel (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, that is why semi trailers don't get respect like Dodge Neons. They use diesel fuel instead of unleaded!
My point is that if your buying a 64bit system that is fast in order to run your old 32bit programs slowly. Wrong tool for the job.
I've got 65 Itanium processors downstairs. They are fast and reliable for high memory bandwidth floating point calculations, which is what we use them for. They may be a disappointment with running IE or Outlook, but for crunching numbers they are great. I have yet to of tried an Opteron but will in the next couple of weeks. From what I understand those too have become great at high memory bandwidth number crunching, but I'll wait for the numbers vs marketing speak. Now, Itaniums do suck in the power consumption and heat dissipation department.
Itaniums get such a bad rep here on Slashdot because its cool to do so. Itaniums are made by the "big guy", Intel. If they were made by AMD they would not get the same rap as they do.
The other big thing against the Itaniums is market need. A generic x86 that you can throw in the trash and replace for about $1k if there are any problems are sufficient for 99% of the servers out there. If not even preferred. Now, what other market would want a fast 64bit architecture with high memory bandwidth -- databases. Sun and Oracle fill this void. Well except for the fast and high memory bandwidth part, but Oracle+Sun is a proven combination with years of experience. Solaris does not run on Itaniums. Linux does (flawlessly), but even Oracle+Linux is not that widely adopted. I have no clue about Windows state on an Itanium. I see no real use to run Windows on an Itanium, but someone else might, but I doubt its very common.
Although Intel has some more to go with the low-voltage Itaniums because they are capped at 1.3GHz, but they are working on that. Also, Intel has dropped the price of these guys considerably. This too was an issue with Itaniums, but they have dropped by about 1/2 the price over the years.
IMHO, Intel should continue on the power management issues and price and market these chips more for number crunching. Their performance on the top500 site is impressive, but even if all of the top 500 computers used 4,000 Itanium processors each, that would only be 2,000,000 processors total, and a super computer that size is not purchased very frequently.
Re:No x86 Compat is the Achilles' Heel (Score:5, Insightful)
bullshit. itaniums get a bad rep on slashdot for any number of reasons, and they cannot all be distilled down to "because it's hip and trendy to bash itanium".
slashdot would still be bashing itanium if it were from amd.
few people like paying $1000+ for a cpu alone, for example.
itanium is a niche processor filling a tiny tiny tiny market. and it is already hitting scaling issues.
itanium also has yet to deliver on most of its performance promises. just about the only one it's delivered on so far is memory bandwidth
intel gambled itanium's future on its dependency of a number of risky and unproven technologies (eg VLIW). in order for itanium to succeed, ALL of these technologies had to succeed. instead what happened is virtually NONE of them did.
it's quite telling when a lot of the intel engineers and scientists involved with itanium are calling it a huge mistake. the p4 guys aren't impressed either
itanium is doomed longterm. most of intel's itanium partners have long since bailed on the architecture, most projects for itanium have been killed off (including windows), which guarantees itanium has no longterm future.
some lessons from itanium may be rolled into other intel mainstream products, but as a product itself itanium's days are numbered. itanium has been a huge black hole sucking billions of r&d from intel while amd has been constantly chipping away at intel's market share with x86_64. itanium has never turned a profit, in over a decade of development on the damned thing. it's only a matter of time before stockholders demand itanium be hauled out to the barn and given both barrels.
most people who have studied itanium closely conclude itanium is an r&d project that should have remained in the labs as pure r&d, and never turned into a product.
Re:No x86 Compat is the Achilles' Heel (Score:3, Informative)
I ran an Itanium-2 cluster (and had briefly an Itanium-1 loaner) and if the compilers were stable, the first generation easil
Re:No x86 Compat is the Achilles' Heel (Score:3, Informative)
No surprise, the Itanium 2 performs much better than the original Itanium, but it's name was alreay soiled by the mediocre preformance of the original.
In addition, all that cache and high-performance bus architecture means th
Removal of heatsinks and serial numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
Two things: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Two things: (Score:5, Informative)
Guess what? It doesn't. Itanium really does outperform MIPS and if you'd care to look it up yourself, you'd see. Itanium and POWER have been rougly neck and neck in vying for the top performance spot since the Itanium 2 was first released. Each new processor from either vendor bests the other.
As for your disparaging remarks about X86, consider that it offers the highest performance outside of Itanium and POWER on floating point and overall keeps pace on integer code. Topping X86 is, believe it or not, a real feat. Top of the line AMD64 and Intel chips are engineering marvels as far as processors go. MIPS certainly can't touch them.
It may be fashionable to dis X86 but if you look at the numbers and the microarchitecture, you'll be hard pressed to find anything significantly better.
Re:Two things: (Score:3, Insightful)
powerpc is an overall better (faster, cheaper, more scalable) design than sparc. it doesnt make the same kind of assumptions as sparc did and thus powerpc was able to scale along with the rest of the industry as technology developed -- powerpc was able to take advantage of new developme
Sure, it's cheap NOW. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it's still expensive (Score:5, Informative)
The article poster is simply trolling. Where the fuck can you get an itanic for $2000? The cpu *alone* costs that much! The article that the moron linked to confirms this: "The 1.4GHz Itanium 2 comes out Monday for $1,172 in 1,000-unit quantities. A 1.6GHz version comes out in May for $2,408 in similar quantities." (last paragraph)
Need I give any more reasons for why it's not popular?
Easy Answer: It started as a flop (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easy Answer: It started as a flop (Score:3, Interesting)
Intel was so late in delivery that all the high performance workstation people abandoned the Itanic.
Re:Easy Answer: It started as a flop (Score:3, Funny)
There's the answer! Now it's clear what has to be done to make this processor a success!
The first version was terrible, you say? Well, then simply apply the one and only strategy that always guarantees that an absolutely horrible first version becomes a great market success.
Put a sticker on it with the name "Microsoft".
--
Here are.. (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Itanium was no failure. (Score:5, Insightful)
When Itanium started, Intel was absolutely nowhere in 64 bit and high-end computing. Thanks to Itanium, over half Intel's competitors simply walked away from the market with little more than a few press releases from Intel.
Consider that at the time, you had Alpha (Dec), PA-RISC (HP), MIPS (SGI), and Sparc as leading 64-bit computing platforms.
HP in it's infinite wisdom was suckered the worst - giving up their own leadership position just to be strung along for many years in Intel's PR bluff. However Wall Street loved the "ooh, intel's story's so aWsUM that even HP is giving up" that SGI spun off and MIPS gave up on the high-end space; and Dec->Compaq->HP undervalued Alpha and it went away.
This has to be the most successful come-from-zero-to-wipe-out-half-the-market story in the history of computing. How can it be considered a failure.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Itanium was no failure. (Score:3, Insightful)
GP poster was trying to say, that for Intel, shrinking the 64 bit market was a strategic goal. Why?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
64-bit Gaming (Score:3, Insightful)
Because for Itanium compatibility they'd have to port everything over to the Itanium proprietary instruction set. You can see how eager they've been to do that for Macs, so guess how likely they are to port it for Itanium.
Inertia. (Score:3, Insightful)
Inertia keeps Microsoft on the desktop, even though it being low hanging fruit for crackers.
Inertia can be a good thing... in this case, it's a bummer. I can safely say that my next game rig will be A64 powered, simply because of... inertia.
No technical details... (Score:2, Interesting)
No good compilers for EPIC (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No good compilers for EPIC (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong.
Having used Intel's compiler, I would think that you would know better. What about inter-module optimizations? Who's going to do that? The compiler or linker. It's the linker buddy. Optimizations aren't just source level. Once you have the assembly, there is still a lot of stuff you can do. Instruction reordering, vectorizations, etc.
the problem is those are well optimized benchmarks (Score:5, Interesting)
Other reasons itanium can't compete:
1) Compare the performance of itanium with xeon/opteron in running native x86 code.
2) Compare the costs of building real end user systems.
3) Compare the availability of windows xp drivers.
A few reasons: (Score:5, Informative)
The BIOS replacement they use is not functional. It's very difficult to set up disks for use, and if you lose the disk that the BIOS data is kept on, you're screwed. As far as I know, there is no way to make that fault-tolerant short of manually storing the contents of that partition on another drive.
Support for the Itaniums has been terrible. The HP systems are riddled with hardware problems, and their support personnel (at the enterprise level) have no idea how to comprehend that they don't operate quite like any other workstation.
It's simple... really (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the integer performance (Score:4, Informative)
It's a pain in the ass (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's a pain in the ass (Score:5, Interesting)
Feel good factor (Score:4, Insightful)
Why as why (Score:3, Interesting)
My personal thought is that price:performance was not in line with other choices available to the end consumer.
Poor Assembly language design (Score:3, Interesting)
Itanium (Score:5, Informative)
The Itanium was designed to change the way processors worked. Most processors today are some sort of dymically scheduled behemoth that are capable of detecting instruction collisions on the fly, and reordering instructions for optimal parallelism and thus performance in the light of those collisions. Itanium takes a completely different approach. It is an extremely wide processor that has absolutely no collision detection or reordering. All of the work in this respect is placed on the compiler's shoulders. In theory, a good compiler could make this chip very, very fast, and in reality, as you see, this can be the case. So why did it fail? Intel hyped the hell out of this processor, and then missed their release date by a full two years. That is microprocessor suicide in the land of Moore's law. So, when Intel delivered a chip too late that failed to perform the way they marketed it to, the chip died. In recent years, Itanium has really come around, but it's hard to escape your past in this industry.
Other relevant problems for adoption are tied to this need for a good compiler. Making a compiler as smart as it needs to be for Itanium to live up to its potential is not cheap, and Intel is not known for just giving away such technology. I'm sure the fees to license Intel's compiler are nontrivial, and that does not encourage development. Realistically, Itanium will never become a desktop chip just because of the massive adoption effort that would go into such a switch.
One thing to note, however, is that other chips aren't that far away. You suggest that a 2ghz or 3ghz Itanium would be incredibly fast, and I agree, but I seriously doubt Intel can ramp it that fast. Also, the Opteron specs you show are for 2.0ghz, and I believe Opteron is up around 2.6 or 2.8 ghz nowadays.
Ultimately, Itanium is a great design, but wrapped in a poorly executed initial implementation. It does teach a good lesson that compilers can really help improve chip performance, and down the road, architectures that take this into account may reign supreme. But I wouldn't look to Itanium to do any more than instruct us for the future. She is not a desktop chip.
Many reasons.... (Score:5, Informative)
Peter.
Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft apps are nonexistent, and open-source apps tend to have crappy performance due to the fact that IA-64 depends overwhelmingly on compiler optimization. Developers can use Intel's compiler, but it requires work to use with most Linux systems (the only other platform that supports IA-64 besides MS, AFAIK).
Net result: no applications => no uptake, QED.
Egg, chicken, all that.
FLOPS isn't enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Too much hype, too long to deliver (Score:5, Insightful)
If it came out on time.
It was so late that by the time it came out it was still better than existing processors, but not by a large enough margin to justify its cost.
As the clock speed goes up, and as the other processors find their limitations and drop out of the race, the Itanium will look better and better. There is, however, a large investment in time and software that must be made before it becomes truly useful. It is unlikely that MS is going to support more than one architecture simultaneously for the desktop or server as it tried to do for x86/alpha.
The big marketing push and the number of companies signing on to the good ship itanic coupled with the constant pushback of the release date caused Intel to lost a lot of the press attention they should have received when it did come out.
It'll be interesting to see what happens over time, especially as Intel wants it to be a server chip.
Of course, this could all be a big leadup to the announcement that Apple is going with the Itanium.
-Adam
Intel didn't learn from IBM Micro Channel (Score:5, Insightful)
Micro Channel failed due to licensing issues. (Score:3, Informative)
If IBM had done a proper job of licensing MCA at a low cost then not only would MCA have replaced the old ISA bus, but alternative bus connection architectures like EISA, VL-Bus, PCI, AGP and PCI Express would have never happened! This is because we know now that MCA could be easily expanded all the way to 64-bit bus connections and support very fast bus
Infanticide (Score:3, Interesting)
In my opinion the p4 was the worst thing ever to come out of any microprocessor house in the last 20 years, as it not only comprimised microprocessor design for the horrible and blind-sighted goal of mainstream marketing, but essentially caused a large part of the current TDP crises the industry is in now, and reinforced our mentally handicapped reliance on single-threaded programming.
The humor in the itanic label has nothing to do with the chips, it has to do with intel trying to have it both ways: intel chips are the most powerful, with the only metric that matters, frequency, and ipc and design efficiency matter little, but also that "oh yeah and we have this amazing chip that is so powerful but runs at half the clock speed." It was a blatent contradiction in marketing messages.
For f*cks sake, they called their double-clocked alu "NetBurst"... seriously, why not add an onboard memory controller and claim it's "SuperBandwithMaker", which uses it's amazing technology to increase the speed of your dial-up connection...
Yes, if you market to customers by treating them as idiots, expect them to choose the stupid product, and ignore you when you claim to offer another product that "no really this is a good chip, not like that other one which we said was the fastest", which is actually better for you in the long run, because you can set a new foundation for improvement.
When amd came out with the opteron at 64-bit, and with surprisingly competitive performance while still running legacy apps at faster speeds, how do you compete with that?
Here's hoping they do manage to resurrect the alpha lines, Ibm even went a little over to the marketing darkside with the g5, trading frequency scaling for TDP, but they usually manage to rebalance the two after a few years of revisions.
Fallacies in the article (Score:5, Insightful)
2. x86 is bad/ugly/dirty/whatever, however Itanium is not exactly clean either. The stacked register file is a good example of that. I personally prefer x86-64, which takes the evolutionary approach: fixes quite a few of the problems of x86, while still retaining the core features.
3. x86 chips do out-of-order execution; Itanium, OTOH relies on the compiler to schedule instructions and bundle them together. The main problem here is that doing instruction scheduling statically is much, much harder than doing it dynamically. An average program has a basic block size that is less than 10 instructions. It's very hard to find parallelism within such small basic blocks, so to be efficient at all, you need to do profiling to build traces/hyperblocks. In fact, profiling on the Itanium can give you a performance boost of 30%. However, profiling is hardly desirable from a software developer's perspective
Itanium problems. (Score:3, Interesting)
Note, it *was* a neat architecture.
Then, everybody got involved. Imagine a roomfull of architecture, compiler, and systems PhD's, each with their own pet idea. And this chip had them ALL in it. Anybody remember the i432? In a way, this was the i433.
BUT. This meant a complete break with the current codebase, and in the final analysis intel didn't have the guts for it. Especially once their hopes for compilers weren't being borne out (once, Intel was a HUGE player in the market for compilers PhD's). So the guys at Intel decided to add x86 hardware compatilbility to this. Then, since their compiler plans weren't working out, they added out-of-order execution.
Now, all of these things had crazy interactions. Suddenly, who knew what it was doing? Then the power... all those units, executing all those dead instructions - it ran HOT. Then the fact that x86 compat and o-o-o were a gigantic boat anchor in terms of chip real estate, driving the cost through the roof pretty much sealed its fate. It became a "server processor". And if you get 7 or 8 P4's for the price of one Itanium... well, your cluster is better served with those 7 or 8 P4's.
Pride goeth.
Poor performance for general-purpose computing (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, there's a lot more processing you can do off-line in the compiler, but you also have a lot less information about how the code is actually going to be executed at compile time.
Theoretically, JIT compilers (Java and
The Itanium2 makes a good supercomputer chip because you can optimize your code very carefully and you've got a good idea what the data looks like and what branches will be taken, etc. at compile time.
Itanium is an astounding success (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me tell y'all a little story.
Back in '94-'95 i was doing the third grade of the Computer Science course at the Royal Institute of Technology, which meant I had to choose a specialization. I chose "Computer Systems", ie. processors, busses, caches and what-not.
This was a very exiting time to be studying processors since (for a fleeting moment) Intel processors where the absolutely worst processors among the serious combatants.
Yes, you read that right. The Alpha was (of course) and unstoppable juggernaut, but through a freak act of development schedules the new MIPS had managed to outstrip the latest Alpha.
After MIPS and Alpha we had PA-RISC, SPARC, PPC and then finally the pathetic, lowly Intel x86.
Alpha had strong plans of totatlly replacing the x86 by offering Alpha based x86 emulations that were faster than the fastest x86 in running x86 code.
But now, Intel announced the Itanium.
Apparently, all the CPU makers sat down and discussed this, and agreed that "They may be last right now, but they have piles of cash. They could do this. They really could."
So, what did the competiton do?
Because of aquisitions, they also happened to be saddled with the best processor ever made, the Alpha.
Stick with dying Intel... Develop best processor. Hmm...
Well, you all know where HP is going.
And then what happend?
Intel didn't deliver... and didn't deliver... and didn't deliver some more.
Year after year passes...
When the Itanium was finally delivered, it was obvious that every other platform could have kept up, if they would just have kept developing their processors!
But they didn't and now they sleep with the fishes.
Conclusion: By making their Itanium announcement, Intel slew four out five serious competitor. It doesn't relly matter if the Itanium sucks. In fact, the Itanium would be Intels greatest success even if they had never delivered it.
Wrong question (Score:4, Interesting)
That question answers itself: You think differently from most people. Highly specialized, hand optimized massively parallel predictable crunching seems to matter to you. It doesn't to most people. You're in a minority. Get used to it.
BTW, i860 and Alpha suffered from basically the same problem.
Hey, I work with Itaniums. (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple of points that seem to have been missed when looking at why the itanium less widespread:
- each CPU is quite large, having a square surface area for the unit about 2" x 5" and it's about 2" high
- That area includes a voltage regulater and the passive cooling fans
- It doesn't include any of the necessary active cooling
If you add these physical factors to the points already made about heat, power and EFI bios, it's obvious to say that Itanium won't run in your mini-ATX destop or laptop. This isn't a slam on the design, as it was never designed to run in those form factors, but it's hard to see how any cpu today is going to have a wide use if it isn't available for dual use for destop and servers. Once you eliminate the desktop market, (and I'm going to lump the workstation market in with the servers) the number of places you can sell these processors drops considerably.Once you start adding in the lack of Windows support for itanium, the strides that the 86_64 architechture has made in capability, and the low numbers of current adopters, it's not looking like Itanium will ever gain widespread acceptance.
Why It's Not For Me... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why this chip is not for me are two reasons:
1: I'm not buying one before the software is ported to it -- and at a comparable price to its PC equivalent!
2: It may be a step above an Opteron for floating point, but is it still that step about a dual processor Opteron that I can buy today for less money than a mono-processor Itantium?
As for the "Itanic" jokes (all of which are way off-base, since heat output of any H.M.S. Itanic would melt any iceberg long before it could do any damage), blame The Register. I saw them use the term long before anyone else.
Simple (Score:5, Informative)
Basically it was pointless. we don't need yet another processor targeted into the same market the POWER64/SPARC64/PARISC and now the X86-64 etc are in.
The whole arch is a mess in my opinion its accually probably worse than the x86, this is evident in how long it took to get the thing out the door. For a processor based on the idea that superscaler wasn't easy and wouldn't perform its beginning to look like the itanic is accually in that boat. Its a dead arch, there are orders of magnitude more x86-64 machines out there even though the itanic had a two year lead. Why should I use itanic when there is a larger software base for PPC/POWER and its multivendor?
POWER is cheaper,faster and more mature and it can barely compete with x86 in the desktop area. ARM has pretty much taken over the smaller chores (cellphones, PDA's MP3 players etc..) and smaller chips like the 8051 clones sit below that.
Give it up, it was stupid, Intel was wrong. My opionion is that itanic was a marking plan to lock up the processor market. If we were all forced to run itaniums back in 96-98 then we would all be buying intel chips for everything. Instead intel had to release the P-Pro to keep ahead of Cyrix/AMD, only they never got far enough ahead to kill AMD to release the pressure and transition everyone to Itanic, where theyhold all kinds of patents and copyrights on the instruction set. Plus they couldn't make the thing work and it slipped for 5 years.
It doesn't deserve much respect (Score:4, Informative)
itanium (itanic) is a poor design for anything other than numbercrunching. It is a relic of theoretical supercomputer designs that were popular in the late 1970s. itanic shines on floating-point benchmarks, and is mediocre at best on everything else.
Since the late 1970s, we have had RISC and then superscalar RISC, some now with elements of VLIW. This provides better real-world (general-purpose) performance using substantially less power and fewer transistors than itanic.
Modern RISC processors (including x86 which are RISC internally) can reschedule execution of instructions dynamically (i.e. at run time). itanic can not. It relies on the compiler to schdule the code. It is only possible to schedule code well at compile time for very well-defined problem sets i.e. floating-point maths intensive programs like numerical simulations. NASA currently owns 5% of the world's itanic processors (in a single machine).
itanic was intel's attempt to kill the 64-bit RISC market, putting all of its competitors out of business. Like all great megalomaniacal plans, it has failed. It was a marketing-driven processor, and a failure.
It can't compete with clunky old UltraSPARC IV on server-oriented workloads. Even that market, which isn't big enough to sustain Sun and its processors, is orders of magnitude bigger than the market in which itanic has any relevance.
For big servers nowadays, you have a choice between Opteron and POWER.
In science and engineering, you're often better with something like Opteron, POWER or something fancy from Cray, NEC or Fujitsu. itanic runs hot and consumes too much electricity.
Has anyone ever seen one? I haven't. There was one at a show once on the Red Hat stand, but they wouldn't let me performance test it... and they wouldn't even let me see it because it had over-heated.
itanic is about the most expensive turkey in computing history.
Re:It doesn't deserve much respect (Score:3, Interesting)
in real supercomputing you do not want your processor to 'auto-schedule' or rearrange your code.
in the end, real special code is still hand oprimized, since no compiler nor any built-in rescheduling algorithms can actually know what I really want to achieve.
Maybe I just want to accept the half ready value because I don't care for part of it.
Maybe I want to put one instruction way ahead to prime a set of registers for what is coming.
A processor which
Why doesn't ppc970 get respect? (Score:3)
rank processor ghz (gflops / #procs) speed
#5 ppc970 2.2 (27910 / 4800) 5.81
#7 itanium2 1.4 (19940 / 4096) 4.86
#10 opteron 2.0 (15250 / 5000) 3.05
#20 xeon 3.06 (9819 / 2500) 3.92
Maybe the question should be, why doesn't the ppc970 get the respect it deserves? I suspect that the ppc970 has a much smaller die than the itanic. Sure the clock speed of the ppc is 0.8 GHz higher, but who cares if the ppc costs 1/2 to 1/4 as much? Also, it would be interesting to know how much power each of them uses.
Re:Physics. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it is easier to grow 100 horses than one horse 100 times as powerful, and yet we've gone ahead and done it anyway, because, in point of fact, it is easier to harness and control one horse than 100.
See The Wheel of Reincarnation.
KFG
Re:Everyone else is doing it! (Score:4, Informative)
I've never had a significant problem with a CPU that couldn't be pointed at some external issue with the platform - be it cooling, the MB chipset sucking, etc. Things that Intel -does- try to "Do Right" by us on.
That said - I use AMD CPUs pretty much exclusively in my work. Xeon 64bit wasn't there when we needed it (Feb of last year) and Opteron beats the shit out of Xeon on the stuff we do and finally, I can get -real- dual-core Optys -now-, not bolt-ons using the same damned broken shared bus that Intel x86 has been beating on forever.
Price, as a matter of fact, is no longer a consideration. I know I'm paying more for AMD. I'm also getting the product I want and need.
Itanium -could- actually fit into my DC. Everything we do is compiled by us, locally, and it's entirely possible that we'd benefit from it. However, even at 2k/CPU I can't justify the cost when we're looking at driving the CPU number up (our jobs are of the type where the more chunks you can divvy your dataset up into, the faster things get done - so the more processers, the better - it doesn't matter if that Itanium gets my process done in 45hours while it takes that Opteron 55 hours if I can throw twice as many Opterons at the problem and get it done in 30 due to smaller data chunks).
Re:Did I miss something? (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA...
That $2000 buys the processor, alone, and I don't believe I know any gamers that buy processors in lots of 1000.
The entire issue of price and performance is moot, however. The severe restriction to acceptance of the chip for the market is the ia64 architecture (with practically non-existant emulation performance). It is very difficult to find commercial software (even HPC software) available for the system, so you're limited to in-house programs and open-source programs (most of which need to be tweaked and rewritten). The platform isn't deployed in sufficient quantities to create enough demand for commercial vendors to bother supporting it yet, so you end up with the chicken-and-egg problem that most Linux gamers are all too familiar with.
Re:Itanium Powering HP/Tandem NonStop Platform (Score:3, Insightful)
Itanium was supposed to be the new base chip, the thing to finally replace x86. Picture high performance and high volume, the other RISC guys weren't supposed to be able to compete. SGI and DEC cowered, shutting down ALPHA and MIPS.
HP decied they wanted in on Itanium early. They partnered with Intel on chip design. Intel designed the first chip, while HP's was the much more highly regarded Itanium II. They bet the farm on it, in some ways more than Intel i