Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM and others will announce on Monday the first servers to use Intel Xeon processors augmented with 64-bit extensions, a technology with major long-term implications.
64-bit Intel server onslaught begins
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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It’s weird how the industry works, marketing and all the bit. Some how what’s popular and well known isn’t always what’s best, or the person that came out with the concept first.
AMD comes out with the architecture and Intel can take it no royalties paid, and since it’s Intel it’s marketable and will be mainstream. Not fair but I guess that’s how it all works.
Stereotypes form because of the media and the bull that they pull. Same goes to any industry, for instance the car market, American Motor Companies have been working for years now designing reliable cars for the industry but since the stereotype works against them for reliability because of past decisions, they’ll forever be condemned.
Just because AMD used to be a minor player doesn’t mean they’ll always be the minor player with buggy products.
because AMD and Intel have cross-licensing agreements.
besides AMD has been making a living on Intel ideas for the past years, so why not return the favor?
by the way, the fact that AMD beat Intel to submission on x86-64 is already great achievement for the smaller chipmaker.
…is that it took Intel making a chip like AMD’s for others to jump onto the bandwagon. Dell renews its commitment to not use AMD in its products, despite the fact that AMD have a better record of late in making good chips than Intel.
I wonder what it would take for Dell to actually begin to use AMD chips. I won’t be buying a Dell until that happens though.
This is good for everyone. AMD needs Intel to have a certain degree of success with their 32/64 offering as they will help build the market and push development efforts. Some companies have had long standing relationships with Intel and have been burned by AMD. …but that’s incidental compared to the fact that 64bit just got a boost, and any company whose got a foot in this will benefit.
10 years or so ago, HP ran a very agressive marketing Campaign whoose broad thrust was “Who Needs 64Bits”. Their target was the DEC Alpha.
Now we will possible see something along the lines of “32bits is for Wimps, It is last years model, trade it in now” and other FUD statement.
How the worm has turned. Both 32bit and 64 bit can live alongside each other until it is really ready for the Consumer Desktop not that the average user would actually realise the different (IMHO).
Then only thing that is left is now long before Itaninc is shelved/de-emphasised by one of its big supporters(HP?). It has taken almost a decade and is still not there.
that is the other way to read this. it is a physical reminder that intel’s itanium has failed.
Intel’s lack of success with itanium is pretty amazing. Remember when the itanium was the chip that would force apple to abandon the powerpc. itanium was to be the chip that would replace most other desktop/server chips and now this. It shows just how hard it is to get people off of the installed x86 base.
As the 64 bit hype pushes forward it would be good to look at intel’s previous hype efforts and how they panned out. “wifi will replace 3G. Wifi will replace 3G.” not.
It is interesting how corporations can completely change directions and/or outright lie without losing credibility.
64bit technology has been around for a long time. So what if intel finally got around to it?
Why are IBM and HP adopting Intel Xeon x86-64 clone? Opteron delivers everything what this Intel chip does, plus has NX as well. Why are there people still out there still refusing to buy AMD? do these CIO’s actually need to be dragged kicking and screaming to a shareholders meeting to justifying buying servers that are more expensive just to actually get CIOs to purchase capital based on the ‘best bang for the buck’ rather than sitting in awe at the Intel logo like a fly looks at awe when a bright light appears?
As for HP, all I can say is ewww, who the heck would purchase an HP server when SUN offers single, dual and quad Opteron servers loaded with Solaris plus one year free subscription to JES? don’t like Solaris? chuck Linux on and run JES on top!
HP workstations are crap, their desktops are crap, and having spent a decent time with their servers, they’re just like their whole product range, crap. Like their ink jet printers that clog up regulary which result in one wasting heaps of ink using the “declogging” software, one wonders why anyone would buy anything from HP.
It is not like people are screaming that they want to buy Opteron servers and vendors are refusing to answer demand. Opteron is a new player in the servers market, companies are more concerned with going with what they know (Xeon) than trying new technologies.
AMD and Intel do have a cross-licensing agreement, but it is funny to see people pointing fingers at Intel for adopting x86-64. As many things as AMD borrowed from Intel I can’t say I have ever read one comment bashing AMD for copying Intel.
AMD sells processors for cheap, but they also operate the company at a loss.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMD&annual
Intel made 5.6 Billion last year, AMD lost 274 million.
Intel owns 90% or more of the cpu market and AMD has just borrowed money for a plant in Germany…so that’s probertly why they ain’t got the cash to show of like intel can.
The book “Inside Intel” is a must read if you want to understand anything about Intel/AMD.
Intel was forced to give birth to AMD because of the
beautiful “brainchild” -second sourcing -by Robert McNamara.
Lets all be happy about that.
We need them both, although, it is rather sad that the Intel 286 was born in the first place. (stupid IBM).
With a processor path based on Motorola we would have won a lot. (or lost less).
The big push starts today because Intel XEON-64 is ready! It’s funny because the supporting chip set is broken. Those nice new dual processor XEON servers with PCI-Extreme slots can’t use any PCI-Extreme cards; nope, you have to use the older PCI-X or just pain PCI cards because the north-bridge is broken and an Extreme card could cause the entire expansion bus to quit working.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103_2-5289900.html
Until Intel fixes the chipset, I would recommend ignoring the Intel computers. If you want a x86-64 system, go get an Opteron.
I still belive that x86 should die since it’s an ugly hack of a CPU design.
Itanium is simply brain dead since the design only works by running instructions in groups of 3. To speed up the processor, you need to add additional execution units and support hyper-threading. Beyond that it gets even worse, since you need to add logic to allow the processor to run 2 groups of three; this is bad because the compiler creates the groups and the CPU can get maximum speed by just re-ordering the groups; thus, it may need to split the groups and recombine them in a better order. Thus to fix the speed issues, they need to go back to the design they started out trying to replace (CISC recompiling to RISC in the CPU; only now it’ll be group decompiling and recompiling).
The DEC Alpha was a nice chip; I’ve done a little assembly language work on it and it’s really clean.
The only current processor that can take on x86 is the PPC. IBM’s hasn’t finished making the processor better and it’s used in more places then Intel chips (cars, video games, game consoles, space probes (both mars landers), …)
“However, because of a glitch in Nocona’s supporting chipset, code-named Lindenhurst, Intel recommends against using PCI Express plug-in cards. The problem is expected to be fixed in the fourth quarter, but in the meantime, the existing older PCI-X interface can be used.”
Am i the only person that finds this part of the article amazing? They are releasing a buggy hardware product that is not even fully functional! with promises to fix it at the end of the year. Doesn’t make sense to upgrade to intel x86 64-bit right now. Wait until the chipset and Windows are finished.
“Intel’s lack of success with itanium is pretty amazing.”
Not really, the Itanium is mainly an HP product intel is really just the foundry. HP is in the process of migrating from PA-RISC to Itanuim and based on what i have seen Itanuim will soon smoke most open-system platforms in the future. Although i haven’t seen any power5 benchmarks yet.
Intel owns 90% or more of the cpu market and AMD has just borrowed money for a plant in German
Yes, but the year before last (02) they lost 1.3 Billion.
“Not really, the Itanium is mainly an HP product intel is really just the foundry.”
intel had hoped to replace x86 with itanium. its amazing that intel with all its market power couldn’t do better than it has with that chip. it is just amazing that despite having upwards of 80% of the chip market intel had to go to hp to develop a chip.
I’ve read a bit about intel’s corporate culture. They apparently don’t retain many of their experienced engineers for long and i personally wonder if that is not starting to bite them in the rear.
HP didn’t build the Itanium, they are just one of the only companies selling them in Bulk.
The Itanium was never designed to replace x86, it was not even designed to perform well on the same types of tasks. 2 very different (but merging?) markets.
Intel probably could have built the Xeon to use the I64 (or simmilar) instruction set but they decided to play nice and follow AMD’s lead extending x86 instead.
And why do many pro-Linux people hate Intel? Linux/Xeon boxes are what is replacing the high end UNIX solutions, not Linux/Opteron.
HP has been selling several Proliant DL series servers with Opterons for several months now.
They have the DL145 (dual proc) and the DL585 (quad proc).
Here’s a link:
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/platforms/index-dl.html
“appropriate timing given that Linux is the only operating system so far that can take advantage of the processor’s 64-bit extensions.”
That’s not true. All the BSDs run perfectly well on x86-64 (http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/amd64/ ,http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html ,
, http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64.html), but the proprietary GNU/LNUX gets the hype once more.
” but the proprietary GNU/LNUX gets the hype once more”
Do you even know what propietary even means?
intel had hoped to replace x86 with itanium. its amazing that intel with all its market power couldn’t do better than it has with that chip.
Not when you consider intel hadn’t expected the Itanium to replace the x86 on commodity hardware until after 2005.
Intel hasn’t “done better” with the Itanium replacing x86 primarily because they haven’t really *tried* to (that an a significant shift in the market towards commodity hardware).
it is just amazing that despite having upwards of 80% of the chip market intel had to go to hp to develop a chip.
Why ? Why is the idea of businesses working together in their common interests “amazing” ?
Want to know why Itanium failed? ring up Intel and request information on where to purchse a Itanium CPU and motherboard. Better yet, step into my shoes, talk to the major distributors and ask them whether it is possible to purchase Itanium CPU’s and motherboards.
When you’re charging too much, there is a lack of software to run on it, and the availability is so low that you’ve got a better chance of getting a hold of finding a needle in a haystack.
Why is this such a big deal? What about distributors such as IBM and HP that already offer dual processor workstations with the new 64-bit Xeon and PCI-Express? The benefit of having options such as installing DCC graphics cards and the choice of 64-bit Linux or Windows installed. What about distributors that are going to shortly ship quad 64-bit processor workstations such as Liebermann ( http://www.go-l.com/ )? This article makes it seem the only use for these new Intel processors is with servers instead of other workloads.