Intel's forthcoming 'Montecito' member of the Itanium processor family will consume 100 watts, a significant drop from the 130 watts of current models and an advantage in an era when power consumption is a top enemy. Intel spokesman Scott McLaughlin confirmed the figure at an Itanium Solutions Alliance meeting here. The change means Itanium will have about 2.5 times the performance per watt of the current Itanium 2 9M model.
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Member since:2005-07-06
You attacked the Itanium 2 on the grounds of its complexity running contrary to the design goals of EPIC. The size of a processor does not represent its complexity. The majority of the Itanium 2 that you alluded to is in its caches, and not the actual core. Its core is quite simple.
No, I attacked the I2 on the grounds of its enormity running contrary to the design goals of VLIW. The whole point of VLIW is to do more with fewer transistors. The great weakness of Itanium is that while it saves a few transistors (say few because, discounting SMT, the POWER5 core isn't that much larger than the I2 core), the savings are erased by the huge instruction and data caches needed to keep the core fed and to hide access latency without the benefit of out-of-order execution.
A 2GHz part does not suggest a goal of theoretically higher clockspeeds. A 2GHz part would be "welcome to the club" for the majority of its competitors. Intel obviously desires to increase the clock speed of their processor, but nothing in their actions suggests that obtaining high clock speeds is their goal.
Itanium2 was supposed to ship at 1.8 GHz to 2.0 GHz (with Foxton). It didn't. Something is bottlenecking the clockspeed of the design, and with a supposed 100W TDP, its probably not heat. So the CPU is likely timing limited in some critical path, something that VLIWs are supposed to have an easier time of than OOO RISCs.
This is the entry you want:
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire X4200 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 2132 2344[/i]
Why is that the system I want? SPEC is a single-threaded benchmark --- it doesn't matter if the other Sun Fire has two CPUs. I want the significantly higher base score of the second system.
Member since:2006-01-01
No, I attacked the I2 on the grounds of its enormity running contrary to the design goals of VLIW.
Wasn't EPIC supposed to make for smaller, simpler CPUs that could scale to higher clockrates?
The Itanium is a simple processor. It simply has an enormous quantity of cache. Yes, its cache is necessary for it to obtain its performance levels. So are the caches on Intel's mobile line and forthcoming processors.
Itanium2 was supposed to ship at 1.8 GHz to 2.0 GHz (with Foxton). It didn't.
Which still doesn't suggest that Intel's design has been intended to scale to high clock speeds. It's never been released with higher clock speeds. Intel could produce an EPIC processor with small real estate that could scale to high clockspeeds, and still perform like ass.
Why is that the system I want? SPEC is a single-threaded benchmark --- it doesn't matter if the other Sun Fire has two CPUs. I want the significantly higher base score of the second system.
To compare 'kind to kind' to remove any variance for comparison other than compiler and processor. As an aside, while SPEC is a single threaded benchmark (or more specifically its subtasks are each unthreaded programs), however it should be noted that the rate scores reflect multiple processes.
Member since:
2006-01-01
Its been shown quite explicitly (hah!) that Itanium needs the ridiculously sized caches to perform adequately. It doesn't matter whether the extra transistors ar ein the caches or in the core --- what matters is the final die size.
You attacked the Itanium 2 on the grounds of its complexity running contrary to the design goals of EPIC. The size of a processor does not represent its complexity. The majority of the Itanium 2 that you alluded to is in its caches, and not the actual core. Its core is quite simple.
Intel did want higher clockspeeds for Montecito -- it was supposed to run up to 2.0 GHz.
A 2GHz part does not suggest a goal of theoretically higher clockspeeds. A 2GHz part would be "welcome to the club" for the majority of its competitors. Intel obviously desires to increase the clock speed of their processor, but nothing in their actions suggests that obtaining high clock speeds is their goal. They've consistently used older processes for fabrication, and completely ignored the clockrate and power consumption of the project for more than a half decade.
This is the entry I used:
Hewlett-Packard Company ProLiant BL25p (AMD Opteron (TM) 254) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 2051 2258
http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/res2005q3/cpu2000-20050902-0465...
This the Madison 9M I used:
HITACHI HITACHI BladeSymphony (1.66GHz/9MB Itanium 2) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 2851 --
http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/res2005q4/cpu2000-20051212-0516...
Here's your selection:
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire X4200 2 cores, 2 chips, 1 core/chip 2256 2518
http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/res2005q4/cpu2000-20050906-0467...
This is the entry you want:
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire X4200 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 2132 2344
That's 33.7% not 26%.
People interested in buying the Madison 9M will most-likely not be doing so based upon SPEC performance, but rather performance in specific computational tasks and doing so with large clusters.