Intel To Ship 2nd Itanium Chip To Rising Expectations

Lycos Worldwide ^ | 3 Jul 2002, 5:39pm ET | Mark Boslet, Dow Jones Newswires, 650-496-1366; mark.boslet@dowjones.com

[ffrancone]

My company's software actually relies extensively on runtime manipulation of binary machine code. It runs as reliably on the AMD chips as on Intel--we have never seen a chip based bug. And, since the computationally intensive part of our code is all FPU based, the best AMD chips run our software much faster than the top of the line Intels.

[mj1234]

Guess what--Compaq is a liar--or extremely stupid--last year
in late June I saw a Non disclosure roadmap given to a fortune 50 company EV8,EV9 were shown--within 2 weeks Compaq
had killed this road map! Had the balls to show the new road
map --Think that company bought Alpha?--they tested Sun and promptly bought a dozen workstations ($125k) they will be
purchasing servers later.If you think you can move all of the compilers and have a stable 32 processor VMS enviroment
great --Recommend that to your company.Have a backup employment plan.AGAIN-COMPAQ got rid of most of their Alpha
engineers!--TRUE 64 unix has been officially killed -WILL NOT BE PORTED TO ITANIUM! Would you like any more kick in the balls? The only reason they talk up VMS is- U.S. government contracts that are in place.So to summarize-
NT-DEAD!----TRUE 64 DEAD---- VMS? believe what you want.

[general_re]

The main problem with your rant is that Compaq doesn't own Alpha any more, HP does. Which is why it's not a surprise that Compaq let its Alpha people go, and why it really doesn't matter what Compaq thinks of Alpha any more ;)

HP has EV7 coming out later this year, and EV9 after that sometime next year. After that, it may very well die, with any valuable technology being rolled into the PA-RISC family, but nobody outside HP knows for sure yet. Anyway, Samsung has a license to manufacture Alphas basically for as long as they like, so even if no new chips come out, Alpha will still be around for a while.

Yes, the Alpha is/was a nice chip, but chips come and chips go, and the world keeps on turning anyway ;)

[Chemnitz]

Think of the bits as how large of a chunk of data the CPU can munch at a time. 64 bits would literally be 8 bytes. Earlier it was only 1 byte at a time. There is a lot more to a computer than gigaherz.

[TheBattman]

Correct. From all the info I have read/heard the G5 and the Itaniums are running at almost identical clock speeds, and coupled with similar pipelines are very comparable in speed.

Now- contrast the pipeline of the P4 and the G4 and you do find a difference. What sort of clock speeds would we see if the P4 had a similar length pipline as the G4? I would imagine there would not be the huge gap in Mhz (or Ghz) that we see now.

[general_re]

Now- contrast the pipeline of the P4 and the G4 and you do find a difference. What sort of clock speeds would we see if the P4 had a similar length pipline as the G4? I would imagine there would not be the huge gap in Mhz (or Ghz) that we see now.

Quite right. It certainly appears that the clock gap between G5 and Itanium, if an y, will be negligible, and therefore any divergence in performance will be attributable to other design choices on either side. I don't know much about the G5 - nobody does, really - except for this hot new bus it's supposed to have, the name of which escapes me at the moment, and enhanced Altivec.

I should correct one thing in my earlier post, before some smart guy jumps all over me - Itanium and I2 do apparently have a section for IA-32 binary backwards-compatibility, so that should be less of an issue for legacy apps, although the EPIC set will still require recompiles/rewrites for best performance. At this point, speaking speculatively about the G5, the difference between the two appears to me to be that the G5 is basically an evolutionary design, building on the strengths of the G4/G4e, whereas Itanium is more of a ground-up redesign. One thing's for sure about Itanium - EPIC/IA-64 is bound to drive compiler writers completely nuts, from what I've seen ;)