With rival AMD showcasing its Opteron systems and its new 2200+ AthlonXP, Intel Corp. released new details of its Itanium 2 chipsets within the U.S. Read the article at ExtremeTech.
Intel Discloses Itanium 2 Chipsets
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From what I can tell the Opteron and Itanium are totally different classes of processors for totally different applications.
The Itanium is marketed entirely for high end (read high dollar) server applications while the Opteron seems to be more of a low/mid level server and workstation grade processor. That seems to position the Opteron on equal footing with the Xeon series.
While it’s interesting to see Intel’s board specs I think they’re going to get their lunch et by AMD unless the Opteron/Hammer processors end up being a total bomb.
> That seems to position the Opteron on equal footing with the Xeon series.
I agree with your comments. JBQ was telling me the same earlier today too.
What I do not understand, is your comment’s title: “What’s the point?”. One of the points of the article woudl be to write what’s new in the CPU world in general, not to compare the AthlonXP with the Itanium.
The Opteron marks AMD’s entry into the professional market. Athlon MP’s was their first attempt, but Opteron is a more serious approach. Intel’s Xeon series is very popular in the workstation and low/mid level servers. You say that Opteron is in equal footing with Intel’s Xeon CPUs and you’re probably right. Bringing 64 bit computing to workstations and low end servers sounds like AMD’s goal.
The “Point” is, Intel is showing to the world that the Itanium does exist, despite the many delays. If Intel wants to keep their existing customers, they have to prove to them that their is hope in the future. Whether or not it’s worth waiting for that’s up to the customers to decide.
The “Point” is, Intel is showing to the world that the Itanium does exist, despite the many delays. If Intel wants to keep their existing customers, they have to prove to them that their is hope in the future. Whether or not it’s worth waiting for that’s up to the customers to decide.
Itanium might exist, but nobody wants it. I don’t see any Itanium boxes in the server rooms that I visit. I hear that Dell is actually cancelling IA-64 models! Not too good…
Because of the delays, Intel has had ample time to drum up developer support. But right now there’s no point in using the new architecture because there’s no software! It’s like a mini version of OSX — too little, too late, and all the crying “wolf” drove away the ISVs. This is a golden opportunity for AMD.
I thinks the Hammer is more of a threat to Sun in the end.
Intel will figure out what to do to save it’s bacon (Yamhill) but Sparcs main benefit over x86 has been the 64bit arch & much larger caches as well as not being x86 etc. The performance of the Hammer with its HT busses will trounce Sparcs in the MP server market on cost grounds, Sun,TI simply won’t be able to match the Sparc (barely 1GHz) against the Hammers target of 2-3GHz.
Interestingly, Sun & HP are both licenses of the Hyper Transport bus, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them both follow the Hammer as well.
Also interesting that both HP & Compaq essentially gave up on uP design handing over both their PA & Alpha teams to Intel. This gives them much more freedom to choose from whats available on the market rather than being forced to eat their own.