
More than a decade ago, Intel ran into an issue trying to deliver what was to be the world's top-ranked supercomputer: it looked possible that its new Pentium Pro processors at the heart of the system might not arrive in time. As a result, the chipmaker made an unusual move by paying Hewlett-Packard $100,000 to evaluate
building the system using its PA-RISC processors in the machine, said Paul Prince, now Dell's chief technology officer for enterprise products but then Intel's system architect for the supercomputer. Called ASCI Red and housed at Sandia National Laboratories, it was designed to be the first supercomputer to cross the threshold of a trillion math calculations per second.
Member since:
2005-07-20
I have to wonder if people who call Itanium a "lemon" and "Itanic" have ever used one.
I do think that Intel didn't get the success they planned on. But it is a good processor.
I have a dual processor Itanium2 1.4GHz (Celestica off eBay) that produces roughly the same speed results as a 2GHz dual Opteron when I compile my software with GCC 4.4 with profiling feedback.
That's pretty good for a 600 MHz speed difference.
Itanium has other neat features, like not using the stack for function call returns. And things like a large selection of jumbo and giant page sizes.