Posted on 07/05/2002 7:06:37 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
PALO ALTO, Calif. -(Dow Jones)- If at first you don't succeed, bring out Itanium 2. That is what Intel Corp. (INTC) will do on Monday to rising expectations that this new top-of-the-line chip will do what its predecessor couldn't: compete for the most demanding of corporate computing jobs. That will mean taking on the titans of high-tech computing, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), all of whom make the powerful Unix servers companies rely on for their internal business systems. Intel is expected to unveiled three Itanium 2 chips, and computer makers such as H-P, IBM, and NEC Corp. (NIPNY) will announce they plan to offer machines using the microprocessors. Noticeably missing from the parade, at least for time being, will be Dell Computer Corp. (DELL), which says it is waiting for Itanium demand to increase before offering servers. Two of the chips to come out Monday will run at speeds of 1 gigahertz and one at 900 megahertz. Each will sell at prices similar to the company's present Itanium products - which are $1,177 to $4,227 - and boast of about a two-fold performance improvement, analysts say. Intel declined to discuss details of the announcement in advance. The "very exciting performance" gains "should make this round a lot different from last year," when the first Itanium hit the market to poor reviews, said Nathan Brookwood, a principal at market researcher Insight 64. "We will see a lot more competition among system vendors." Any improvement in market acceptance would be welcome at Intel as it tries to broaden its business beyond the personal-computer market. The company spent an estimated $1 billion developing the product line and watched as sales of its first major chip redesign in 16 years were unexpectedly sluggish. "It's a very important product for us," says Lisa Hambrick, director of Intel's enterprise processor marketing. The high-performance server market is dominated by Unix products. "We're looking to change that." But the hurdles are considerable. Even loyal computer maker Dell is proving slow to line up. "We're taking a wait and see approach to it," says spokesman Bruce Anderson. The company is "really waiting for higher volume." Dell will continue to sell the PowerEdge 7150 it launched last May with the first Itanium chip, but has discontinued an Itanium workstation. It also says it is looking at Intel competitor Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD) upcoming Opteron chip, which plans to take on both Intel's Xeon and Itanium server processors. "We're talking to AMD," says Anderson. "We're evaluating their technology all the time." AMD plans to ship Opteron in the first half of next year and claims it is an easier step into 64-bit computing than Itanium. Chips with 64-bit technology process data in larger chunks and are more efficient at scooping long strings of information out of big databases and programs. Opteron is designed to drive down costs and appeal to a broader segment of the server market than Itanium, said AMD Marketing Director Benjamin Williams. However, it also isn't being designed to run in top-end servers that use more than 8 processors at a time. Companies such as H-P hope to sell systems with 64 Itanium 2 chips by next year. Still, according to Williams, Itanium's success is not assured. "I'm not sure it's been adopted." Some vendors believe that will change. "The marketplace will pick up starting in the second half of the year," says Mark Hudson, worldwide marketing manager at HP. "This is an architecture that will be around for the next 20 years." Hudson estimates HP's Itanium 2 systems will be about 20% cheaper to buy than the H-P Unix system as well as smaller and less costly to support. "I think people's minds are coming around," he said. But the "ecosystem" of software developers and service companies needs to expand. "The ecosystem is the biggest question mark," he said. Intel anticipates growing backing for the chip. The first Itanium had just slightly more than 100 mostly technical commercial programs running on it. A new wave of Itanium 2 programs from big software makers including Oracle Corp. ( ORCL), SAP AG (SAP) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is expected late this year or early next. BEA Systems Inc. (BEAS) will have it application server available in the fourth quarter, says Vice President Gamiel Gran. The first Itanium's strength was its number-crunching ability, a trait useful in scientific applications. Changes to Itanium 2 now make it better at moving around lots of data, said Brookwood. This is an attribute valued by corporations. Intel will find out if it is enough. -By Mark Boslet, Dow Jones Newswires, 650-496-1366; mark.boslet@dowjones.com (This story was originally published by Dow Jones Newswires)
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We are in a competing technologies market, clustering vs faster processors. In these types of markets, lower costs, tend to win out. At first, it would appear that clustering would be the lower cost due to the lower cost of initial hardware. However, it often comes at a higher cost in operational overhead. With the 64 bit chips, you have an application re-write overhead. My gut is telling me that managers will adopt a wait and see attitude.
It will be interesting to see how this moves. I suspect that since both technogies are new, it will be a "fair" fight. Just my .02
Come on, inform me! I have assumed the position and await enlightenment!
Think of it in reverse: When Intel was still producing the 32-bit PII, AMD was making the 16-bit K6. But the performance of the two chips was simular because Intels "300 MHZ PII" was running at 300 MHZ but AMDs "300 MHZ K6" was actually running much faster: more like 550 MHZ. The net effect was that it ran like a "300 MHZ" PII.
As for day-to-day applications most of the reasons you notice your wife's new computer running so fast is not the chip itself but the peripherals like the hard drive. You probably have a 3400 RPM drive and you wife's system probably has a 7200 RPM drive with UDMA 100. She probably has DDR memory too, as opposed to your memory which is probably running at 66 MHZ. Not to mention a superior video card.
Where the processor really comes into play is in rendering graphics or sorting large database tables...When opening Word or something like that, it's everything else in the computer that comes into play.
That's true, as far as it goes. But there's a balance to be struck between clock rate and IPC's. The reason you increase the pipeline is so you can up the clock rate in the first place, so it's a trade-off - it's not the case that a shorter pipeline automatically equals better performance. Really, who cares about "efficiency" over raw performance? It's not like a car, where the mileage means something to the end user ;)
So, the first G4's had a 4-stage pipeline, the G4e's have a 7-stage pipeline, and the G5 is supposed to have a 10-stage pipeline, same as Itanium, so it can be introduced at 1.6 GHz. Which will put Apple/Moto in the difficult position of explaining that the "megahertz myth" applies only to Intel processors ;)
P4 to Itanium is a little different than jumping from G4 to G5, which is probably why it's slow to be accepted - G5 supposedly has a section for 32-bit backwards-compatibility, while Itanium is all 64-bit VLIW processing, which means a recompile for everything, unlike the G5...
For a particular task, a computer does work at the speed of the slowest component involved in that work task!
Fast computers and slow computers all wait at the same speed!
The world of the Personal Computers has really come a long way. We are now rehashing many of the (nearly) same arguments that took place relative to mainframes and supercomputers some years ago!
Honestly, I don't know when they'll be out, beyond the obligatory Real Soon Now - sometime this summer or fall, I'd imagine ;)
Anyway, you're wrong. Alpha isn't dead just yet - HP just released their Alpha roadmap the other day.
I have never trusted AMD chips due to concerns about compatibility. Since the days of DOS and Win 3.1. I used to write and sell graphics software and a user reported a bug I could not reproduce. Fortunately he was located close to me. On a hunch, I looked inside his PC and found a non-Intel chip. Replaced it with a "genuine Intel" and the problem went away. A big piece of my software was in assembly; talked directly to the hardware. I still have such concerns, but perhaps they are now unwarranted. Any advice?
--Boris
But they were run hotter to make up for performance.
The thing to remember is that neither MHz rating, pipelines, or the number of bits in the word, 32 or 64 is enough by itself. Its how the whole things plays together with everything else. Pipelining for example depends on branch prediction of an conditional statement: if you guess wrong, guess what? you have to THROW AWAY the contents of the pipeline unless you actually have loaded BOTH BRANCHES
Other factors will come into play: how cache is used, how big the cache is and how cache coherence is handled if you have multiple CPUS sharing physical memory...what do you do if one of the computers changes an area of memory and the other one was also accessing it?
It is a complex game and i can hardly wait to see how the new CPUS handle. Like watching Ferrari, Jaguar, Porsche and Mercedes duke it out at LeMans...(if the damn Eurosnots hadn't changed the rules to exclude the GT40 we could probably add Ford to this list)
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