Future Itanium and Xeon Processors Socket-Intercompatible

[Frick]

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/hp-itanium/

HP is about the only ones left supporting Itanium, and 700 million is almost a fourth of the whole Itanium sales from Intel.

http://peopleprocesstech.com/2012/06/05/why-the-hp-superdome-is-as-dead-as-a-dodo/

Westmere does most of the same things. Bulldozer supports ECC memory, and its own caches are ECC protected.

It seems like those articles say different things than Katanai does. That "it turned out that Intel’s boring old X86 chips — now sold as Xeon — were good enough to get the job done." So who should I listen to?

 

[hellrazor]

Morale of the story: Itanium is shit and needs to die.

 

[Steevo]

I feel like you are double posting here and telling users things they you yourself don't know.

They have AS/400 systems with more up time than Itanium chips have been around. Itanium REQUIRES new software to be written, its slow, very specific application, and is only still around due to HP PAYING Intel to keep it that way.

 

[Steevo]

That first article also says that Itanium is nearing EOL and that's why Oracle initiated that lawsuit. Please scroll down and you will see an article on this page about the new Itanium 9500 processor that will be released. This article right here talks about the new upcoming Itanium platform. How is that in any way End of Life of a product?!? Maybe you don't know but Oracle is a direct competitor with HP and Intel in the non x86 CPU market after their aquisition of SUN...





Right, because you say so Steevo. Companies pay money to sell stuff not make money. AS/400 is a dead architecture and as you can see in this thread Itanium chips are currently produced. But like I've said, I'm wasting my time here, you people know it all there's no point in me trying to share something with you...

http://www.zdnet.com/server-sales-slow-but-dell-shows-growth-hp-ibm-tied-for-no-1-7000003427/

I didn't say anything other than you have not provided anything other than your own sayings.


First, Oracle was dumping Itanium, and HP and Intel sued them.

http://www.zdnet.com/oracle-will-support-hp-itanium-systems-can-fud-damage-be-reversed-7000003770/

http://www.businessinsider.com/hp-shows-off-new-itanium-servers-2012-11


Now that we have that cleared up lets move on to.


Intel promised another architecture by now that fixes the heat, power consumption and performance issues and this chip has and is already late. Now they are saying Xeon will be more than capable of what Itanium is doing now.

HP PAID Intel almost 700 MILLION dollars to keep making Itanium so their artificially created hardware niche will survive.

AS/400 is a generic term, how about Zseries servers, that kick the shit out of Itanium systems by at least a factor of 2 and in many applications closer to 6? The issues that IBM and user face is the lengthy process to become a certified tech, and once you are companies want you to have experience. But the pay is amazing, a friend makes well into 6 figures to babysit two tandem servers that some hospitals in south Florida use.

So in short, the Itanic is going away, Xeon, and Knights corner are on the way in.

 

[dude12564]

http://www.zdnet.com/server-sales-slow-but-dell-shows-growth-hp-ibm-tied-for-no-1-7000003427/

I didn't say anything other than you have not provided anything other than your own sayings.


First, Oracle was dumping Itanium, and HP and Intel sued them.

http://www.zdnet.com/oracle-will-support-hp-itanium-systems-can-fud-damage-be-reversed-7000003770/

http://www.businessinsider.com/hp-shows-off-new-itanium-servers-2012-11


Now that we have that cleared up lets move on to.


Intel promised another architecture by now that fixes the heat, power consumption and performance issues and this chip has and is already late. Now they are saying Xeon will be more than capable of what Itanium is doing now.

HP PAID Intel almost 700 MILLION dollars to keep making Itanium so their artificially created hardware niche will survive.

AS/400 is a generic term, how about Zseries servers, that kick the shit out of Itanium systems by at least a factor of 2 and in many applications closer to 6? The issues that IBM and user face is the lengthy process to become a certified tech, and once you are companies want you to have experience. But the pay is amazing, a friend makes well into 6 figures to babysit two tandem servers that some hospitals in south Florida use.

So in short, the Itanic is going away, Xeon, and Knights corner are on the way in.

When did Intel sue Oracle... Wasn't it only HP?

 

[Steevo]

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/intel-oracle-hp/


www.google.com

Just in case some didn't know how to find any information that wasn't in PDF form, I will caution you, there might be some truthful information that doesn't match up with your reality, and it may cause you to think instead of just spewing what you have read as the only truth.

 

[cdawall]

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/intel-oracle-hp/


www.google.com

Just in case some didn't know how to find any information that wasn't in PDF form, I will caution you, there might be some truthful information that doesn't match up with your reality, and it may cause you to think instead of just spewing what you have read as the only truth.

ouch...

 

[FordGT90Concept]

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/intel-oracle-hp/

Oh wow, a love hate triangle. No wonder all this Itanium stuff is being released out of the blue. Intel/HP wants to prove to Oracle/judge that Itanium is still relevant.

 

[Completely Bonkers]

Someone is getting very aggressive, defensive, and standing on their high-horse. Ready to insult others as an alternative to factual, constructive debate. Psychiatrists would say that is behavioural evidence of someone standing on thin ice. And to deny garbage-in, garbage-out is very worrysome. We can design data validation methods, but no PROCESSOR per se is capable of removing errors from calculations. "Oh, that formula is wrong", "Oh, that data item in the database might be wrong or biased"

Looking into the Itanium architecture, it is apparent based on it's design, that it was designed for WORKSTATION use. It has an ENORMOUS number of fast extended precision floating point registers with 84-bit precision... more than x87 (80bit) and more than SSE (64bit). It has 128 FP registers, and a float stack. It can do incredibly complex and convoluted maths calculations, permutations, etc. without loss of interim accuracy before committing results to memory. With 128 FP registers it is 16x as many as the x87, the "maths" part of your regular x86 CPU. It is faster and more accurate on calculations. It was designed as a scientific microprocessor. You do not need floating point in data centers.

BTW, anyone remember the x487 bug? FP bugs in Pentium 4. Was that spotted by a human, or did the computer tell us all by itself?! LOL.

If Itanium is being used for transactional data and data centre, rather than data crunching research, it is a historical consequence of politics and/or ignorance, not feature set of the processor. It is hardly surprising that for most Oracle implementations, it is not optimal.

What has also become clear from legal documents made open by court proceedings, is that HP has paid Intel $690 million to continue to support and develop the Itanium processor. The whole Itanium R&D, and PR budget, has essentially been paid for by HP. The reasons that HP has done this is beyond our knowledge. I would suspect DARPA contracts where HP has signed up for 10 year+ projects with DARPA. If Intel dropped Itanium, then HP would default on these contracts, with obvious consequences.

Itanium is somewhat behind on legacy I/O due to having to design Itanium compatible chipsets. When new I/O is released, it is time consuming and expensive to design new chipsets to provide this I/O.

So Intel will now put the "Itanium core" the same Xeon package and be able to use the same supporint i/o chipsets. Good idea to save costs. What does it mean? That the i/o end will have the same functionality (security, data correction, EEC) as a Xeon based system.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Looking into the Itanium architecture, it is apparent based on it's design, that it was designed for WORKSTATION use.

No, it is strictly and explicitly for mainframe, mission-critical servers. You'll never find Itanium in a workstation computer.

Edit: These new "modular" chips with Xeon and Itanium shared could find their way in to workstations but prior to this, they weren't intended for workstations at all.

 

[Katanai]

Well, this forum has gone down the gutter. techpowerup is a good site and for a time the forum showed some promise but nowadays it's just laughable. Yeah, whatever, you keep to your closed community based on pictures, articles and dreams, I'll keep to the front page like I did for a long time now...

 

[Steevo]

http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/performance.pdf

 

[zAAm]

Well, this forum has gone down the gutter. techpowerup is a good site and for a time the forum showed some promise but nowadays it's just laughable. Yeah, whatever, you keep to your closed community based on pictures, articles and dreams, I'll keep to the front page like I did for a long time now...

Haha, based on this thread? Why? Because of meaningful discussion? Would you rather just be called right and have no one challenge you?

 

[Frick]

Haha, based on this thread? Why? Because of meaningful discussion? Would you rather just be called right and have no one challenge you?

It's probably more because he comes in and gives Bonkers his experience and no one listens. Miscommunication follows, then insults. It is more common now than it used to be. I'm pretty sure Steevo didn't even read katanais posts.

Anyway I don't see the problem with HP paying for Itanium development. If anything that juse proves there's a niche for it (as opposed to a glorious mass market gangbang).

 

[Completely Bonkers]

No, it is strictly and explicitly for mainframe, mission-critical servers. You'll never find Itanium in a workstation computer.

Edit: These new "modular" chips with Xeon and Itanium shared could find their way in to workstations but prior to this, they weren't intended for workstations at all.

Perhaps we are using the term workstation in different ways. My mistake. I kind of used workstation as modern version of mini-computer. What I mean is this: Itanium was not architecturally designed for TRANSACTION PROCESSING DATA CENTRE (aka mainframe) but rather as a NUMBER CRUNCHING MACHINE, ie scientific HPC. Go look at the architecture of the microprocessor. It is clearly optimised for FLOATING POINT and calculations not transactional data processing.

Look at Steevo's PDF. Itanium 2 is the fasted GFLOPS per MHz. And that was Itanium 2, not the current Itanium 9300 (Tukwila: 2010) which would probably do even better.

Not that you CANT use it for enterprise servers. But it was not DESIGNED as an enterprise server. This is one of the problems with Oracle. Crap performance.

Quoting from wiki (I know not the best source) "During development, Intel, HP, and industry analysts predicted that IA-64 would dominate in servers, workstations, and high-end desktops". NEVER TARGETED at mainframe data transaction processing.

Remember that Itanium WAS THE 64-BIT processor to replace x86. Or intended to be. And a way for Intel to cut out all x86 licensees from 64bit. But AMD did their AMD64 extensions to x86 and quickly 64bit was possible in the regular commercial/consumer CPU space. Then Intel has to license AMD64 for THEIR x86 CPUs!

 

[zAAm]

It's probably more because he comes in and gives Bonkers his experience and no one listens. Miscommunication follows, then insults. It is more common now than it used to be. I'm pretty sure Steevo didn't even read katanais posts.

Anyway I don't see the problem with HP paying for Itanium development. If anything that juse proves there's a niche for it (as opposed to a glorious mass market gangbang).

Granted, but we did listen to his experience. I just challenged the logic error part, but I agree with all the rest he said in terms of the architecture. I do hate people who take it personally if they disagree with someone else though i.e. saying "Your argument is so stupid I won't even start". The way you behave in the face of trolls etc says a lot about you...

I agree with you, HP is paying for a chip they need and want to use. It's as simple as that and I don't see anything wrong with it. Economics will destroy Itanium if there is no market for it - which is clearly not the case atm.

 

[eidairaman1]

Granted, but we did listen to his experience. I just challenged the logic error part, but I agree with all the rest he said in terms of the architecture. I do hate people who take it personally if they disagree with someone else though i.e. saying "Your argument is so stupid I won't even start". The way you behave in the face of trolls etc says a lot about you...

I agree with you, HP is paying for a chip they need and want to use. It's as simple as that and I don't see anything wrong with it. Economics will destroy Itanium if there is no market for it - which is clearly not the case atm.

Logic Error is known as Erratta- Intel Coins this with every Processor out

 

[Completely Bonkers]

From the horse's mouth. HP, 2001: http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2001/apr-jun/itanium.html

"But for some HP scientists, the product launch -- a workstation and two servers -- marks the culmination of research...These processors are intended for dynamic Internet-based interactions, complex computations, rich media processing and object- oriented environments."

 

[Frick]

From the horse's mouth. HP, 2001: http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2001/apr-jun/itanium.html

"But for some HP scientists, the product launch -- a workstation and two servers -- marks the culmination of research...These processors are intended for dynamic Internet-based interactions, complex computations, rich media processing and object- oriented environments."

That might have been the intention but that hardly matters now.

 

[Super XP]

Can't itanium just die already?

I thought Itanium died a horrible death way back in the Athlon 64 days when AMD was blowing Intel apart