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Why Doesn't the Itanium Get the Respect It's Due?
Posted by
Cliff
on Mon Jul 11, 2005 12:14 PM
from the low-opinion-but-decent-performance dept.
from the low-opinion-but-decent-performance dept.
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:
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)."
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)."
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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!
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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: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.
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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.
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Re:compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
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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."
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It is true for processors as it is for people... (Score:5, Funny)
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*
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Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Follow the herd! (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Itanium2 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Itanium2 (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I had that class.
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Re:Itanium2 (Score:5, Funny)
I recognize all of the words, but it still doesn't make sense.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Easy Answer: It started as a flop (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are.. (Score:5, Informative)
No good compilers for EPIC (Score:5, Interesting)
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 a pain in the ass (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's a pain in the ass (Score:5, Interesting)
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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)
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 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.
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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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