Submitted by “On January 26th, 2005, the Itanium Solutions Alliance (Intel, Hewlett-Packard, SGI, NEC, Hitachi, Bull SA, Fujitsu, and Unisys) proudly announced that its members had banded together to invest $10 billion over the next four years to improve Itanium’s features and functions and strengthen its market position. This huge investment in this architecture at this time forces us to ask a lot of tough questions about the wisdom of this action… [.pdf]”
Who the hell is Clabby Analytics and why does their opinion matter over fortune 500 companies investment in itanium. Its obvious the see a future in the platform.
Unless those fast CPUs are used for science and research, it’s non-sense.
Why doesnt intel make a desktop version of the itanium and then apple could use it. Its time we just broke away from x86 all together and started from a clean slate, I for one would be all for it…
Edited 2006-03-02 01:11
I’m not against competition, but I already see POWER and SPARC filling the needs Itanium hopes to fill. Unfourtnatly, x86 is going to stick around much longer…
I’m not against competition, but I already see POWER and SPARC filling the needs Itanium hopes to fill. Unfourtnatly, x86 is going to stick around much longer…
True, but at the same time, however, Itanium needs to be opened up and standardised like SPARC and OpenPOWER (eventually) are done/doing; they need to get more vendors on board than just themselves; couple that with the need to also pull down the price of the processor out of the stratosphere and something approaching Opteron pricing, then you’ll see a move – until then, Itanium will remain a niche product with a smaller market share than SPARC and POWER.
The simple fact is, they don’t have the volume, and the only way to get volume is to concerntrate on deliverying large volume, low cost technical workstations and servers, a good selection of operating systems, and a decent network of ISV’s supplying software of comparable quality as their x86 versions, and properly optimised for Itanium.
need to also pull down the price of the processor out of the stratosphere
Itanium 2-1.4GHz Processor 4MB L3 $1200
Opteron 880 2.4Ghz $1400
BTW the Itanium price/performance ratio is one of the industry best. For example look here:
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2006_jan/tpcc_nec_012506.html
Itanium 2-1.4GHz Processor 4MB L3 $1200
Opteron 880 2.4Ghz $1400
Too bad:
1) Most vendors have killed off their Itanium workstations; and when they did sell, they were overly expensive and couldn’t be justified.
2) You can’t purchase an Itanium processor or motherboard through any channels, unless of course you’re a big OEM – rules out people like me and those who sell servers and workstations, but not in the volume that Intel expect.
Why doesnt intel make a desktop version of the itanium and then apple could use it
Apple bet on Intel NGMA.
It will be a performance monster for 1/10 of itanium cost.
HP is so blind. They killed 2 established high-performance platforms in favor of “brilliant” EPIC idea. What they thought about? Probably they thought what intel will kill x86 too? haha It is as stupid as closing a gold mine with a tonns of yellow metal inside.
Edited 2006-03-02 12:45
wow all this to invest in Itanuim. and to think with that money they could have made one episode of “who wants to be a 10 billionare”
or fed and clothed some people
That seems to be what it’s doing.
Do the engineers only work in gold plated offices? or perhaps they require steak and lobster to be served on the hour to all employees includiing janitors.
Sun can make a new proccessor with 8 cores and 4 threads per core, that trounces x86 and amd on most non fp tasks… i’m sure it wouldn’t cost more than another few million to put a fpu on each since its allready planned. I’m sure looking at Sun’s financial statements would show that they didn’t spend more than a couple hundred million. No where near the 20 billion dollars that intel and its friends have spend on this CPU as they keep shrinking its goals.
yeah, go there and get things done!!!1one
Sun can make a new proccessor with 8 cores and 4 threads per core, that trounces x86 and amd on most non fp tasks…
Dude, it’s not just the numerical number of cores per CPU. SUN T1 was designed for massive multithreading apps and each core is based on obsolete in-order execution mechanism. It’s NOT a number-crunching CPU. Even more, if application are not carefully written ( access to single global variable will serialize execution of ALL hardware threads running on each core), most apps won’t have any benefit.
Itanium’s EPIC-style VLIW design eats every single RISC/CISC for breakfast. It is very unfortuate that the original Itanium’s engineers decided to use high-latency cache that clobbered the whole execution pipeline. If Alpha was killed by corporate greed, IA-64 will be killed by market inertia.
OTOH, AMD64 has the best price/performance ratio than any other CPU. I guess x86 curse will float around for at least a decade. I’m so sick of x86 and CISC vs. RISC debate, and would really like to see IA-64 on desktop
Itanium’s EPIC-style VLIW design eats every single RISC/CISC for breakfast.
…for the task it was designed. Nothing more, nothing less. It is not too hard to kill the performance of itanium since it relies so heavily on compiler optimisations and the huge caches. Itanium is, by design, In-order and in far too many ways feels a bit “yesterday” than fresh and innovative.
The field of excellence for itanium is FP-math. Integer calcs are not too impressive.
IA-64 will be killed by market inertia.
Partly, itanium will be killed because the enormous investments have not paid off and the desktops promises have utterly failed to materialise (wasn’t 2004 supposed to be the year of a good desktop itanium cpu?). Itanium and the NetBurst core was born out of the idea that transistors get faster and that the cooling ideas of yesterday would work in the future. We know what happened to NetBurst… Where is the desktop itanium that does not require a personal powerplant to run?
that trounces x86 and amd on most non fp tasks
On most integer tasks the T1 will do no such thing. The T1 is not designed to compete with the x86 for most integer tasks, it’s designed to compete in certain server segments with power efficiency and it does that well. If you think putting a single FPU on each of the cores of the T1 would make it competitive with the IA-64 in the same niche that’s just silly.
guess we will have to wait and see how the benchmarks turnout, the T1000 has turned out to be very powerful on lots of workloads. Of course the itanium may win in single threaded workloads, but who uses a server for a single threaded workloads these days, the task certainly doesn’t scale.
I know that IBM does not really care about the desktop, but I think they should have paid attention to it. So they are making lots more money on XBOX360 and PS3 and other devices.
But they should have made APPLE happy!!! The thing is they should have treated the Gx chips as a top priority ..WHY because APPLE using IBM PPC was a marketing thing. So the revenues weren’t high, but how much attention did you get from it. Usually you have to pay to get media attention, in this instance you were getting PPC arch in front of the public for free!!!
DUMB move. I am impressed at SUN, if only they can make their chips affordable for high end workstations!
I totally agree. Why not a desktop Sparc also? Or a mini-itx sparc. They can be very succesful.
… that comes to my mind is “it’s their money afteralls…” (:
Are you people aware of how much money 10 billion US dollars is?
To put this into perspective: the WHOLE market capitalization of Advanced Micro Devices is 16 billion. And keep in mind that AMD is not a fabless, IP-only company: that money gets you, among others, the gigantic Dresden FAb 36: http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/Additional/47a-v001sq_…
AMD has facilities in USA, Singapore, China, Japan and Europe.
So, this is what, basically, 10 billion could get you, if you used it wisely. How much did Intel spend on the Itanium already? Oh yeah…
Well they need to add the lifeboats to the itanic. 😉