New Intel Itanium Processor 9500 Delivers Breakthrough Capabilities

[btarunr]

In an era of unprecedented growth in data usage, businesses require powerful computing solutions that can deliver scalable and resilient performance to run IT's most mission-critical applications. The new Intel Itanium processor 9500 series is more than twice as powerful as the previous generation, making it ideal for today's most demanding workloads, including business analytics, database, and large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Systems based on Intel's Itanium processors run in more than three-quarters of the World's Global 100 companies across industries such as aerospace, energy, life sciences and telecommunications. With the Intel Itanium processor 9500 series, these industries will benefit from a leap in performance and an increase in world-class reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) capabilities.



"In a world where businesses are increasingly dependent on IT for their competitive advantage, more and more business applications are rightfully called "mission critical"; they must be always available, highly responsive and extremely reliable. It's for precisely these computing workloads that we've developed the Intel Itanium 9500 processor," said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. "Built on a new microarchitecture and providing breakthrough performance, the Intel Itanium 9500 processor family signals Intel's ongoing commitment to deliver unparalleled reliability, availability and scalability to meet the critical application demands across all industries."

Enterprise Performance with World-Class Availability
Containing 3.1 billion transistors, the Intel Itanium processor 9500 series is Intel's most sophisticated general purpose processors to date. It supports up to twice as many cores (8 instead of 4) than the previous-generation processor, packs up to 54 MB of on-die memory, and enables up to 2 TB of low voltage DIMMs in a four-socket configuration. The speed of the processor increased 40 percent over the previous generation in lower power configurations. The new frequencies range from 1.73 GHz and a power level of 130 watts, to 2.53 GHz at a power level of 170 watts.

Delivering the highest levels of Intel Itanium performance, the new processors enable highly scalable deployments with world-class availability for data-intensive applications where downtime is not an option. These include ERP, supply chain management and customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Modular Development Model Provides More Flexibility
In 2010, Intel introduced its common platform strategy that allows Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon processors to utilize common platform ingredients including chipsets, interconnects and memory. This strategy gives Intel the ability to cascade the strength of Intel Itanium RAS features to benefit the Intel Xeon processor E7 family, and allows Intel Itanium to further extract the efficiencies and value of higher volume economics. For the next-generation Intel Itanium product family, code-named "Kittson," Intel will employ an innovative model for Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon development called "Modular Development Model." The model will extend the common platform strategy by sharing silicon-level design elements and socket compatibility. The result for Intel is an even more sustainable path to bring future Itanium processors to market. In addition, OEMs will be able to develop one single motherboard platform for both architectures.

Industry Support
Intel Itanium processors continue to maintain strong industry support among systems makers such as Bull*, Hitachi*, HP*, Inspur* and NEC*. Enterprise applications are widely available from multiple vendors, such as, Oracle*, SAP*, SAS*, Sybase* and Temenos*, among other vendors that underscore the ISV community's efforts to ensure the success of the Intel Itanium mission-critical ecosystem.

"A mission-critical IT infrastructure with resiliency, scalability and high availability is critical to the success of enterprises," said Ric Lewis, vice president and interim general manager, Business Critical Systems, HP. "The addition of the Intel Itanium processor 9500 series to our newly enhanced HP Integrity and HP-UX portfolio provides breakthrough performance, increased productivity and delivers on HP's commitment to provide our customers with investment protection."

"NEC has been working with Intel more than 15 years to build enterprise servers based on Intel Itanium processors," said Kazuaki Iwamoto, vice president and senior general manager of IT hardware operations unit, NEC Corporation. "We are pleased to provide our customers with the new enterprise servers based on Intel Itanium processor 9500 series for their highly scalable and mission critical systems."

Pricing and Availability
The Intel Itanium processor 9500 series is available now and is priced from $1,350 to $4,650 in quantities of 1,000 units. For more information, refer to the product brief.

[blanarahul]

Sounds exiting for servers but what is MCC?

[Feanor]

54 mb of on-die cache...

Just wow

[zAAm]

Just one step closer to the merging of Itanium and Xeon architectures...

[Cortex]

Cannot find does it support quad precision (128bit) FP and how fast.

[ensabrenoir]

Only intel could use the i word and make it awesome.....again for the first time

[EpicShweetness]

What so what use do these serve in the Enterprise? They have a very high TDP a slow clock and HUGE cache? The only ability I can see is the ability to take a massive amount of data in at one time and crunch it with minimal slow down's from HDD/SSD's .
Idk, all I know is with its DIMM capacity (2TB) whooo!!! Holy VM's . . . wait clock cycles would soar .

[Ghost]

Originally Posted by Feanor

54 mb of on-die cache...

Just wow

It's 54 MB, not 54 mb. Difference between the two would be huge, but 54 mb isn't even possible.

[Aquinus]

Originally Posted by zAAm

Just one step closer to the merging of Itanium and Xeon architectures...

Trolling trolling trolling, people keep on trolling. Doh!

Itanium doesn't use x86, it uses IA64. Instead of x86 where a program is compiled and the pipeline and CPU determines what level of parallelism happens during execution. IA64's compiler determines the optimal way to execute the program at compilation which is why IA64 has a ridiculous number of registers and cache. Hardware usage is optimized at the compiler level so less needs to be done on the CPU itself eliminating a lot of overhead. You wouldn't want IA64 for normal applications, but for crunching large and complex numbers and equations, you can benefit by having everything in the registers and in cache.

[3870x2]

Originally Posted by Aquinus

Trolling trolling trolling, people keep on trolling. Doh!

Itanium doesn't use x86, it uses IA64. Instead of x86 where a program is compiled and the pipeline and CPU determines what level of parallelism happens during execution. IA64's compiler determines the optimal way to execute the program at compilation which is why IA64 has a ridiculous number of registers and cache. Hardware usage is optimized at the compiler level so less needs to be done on the CPU itself eliminating a lot of overhead. You wouldn't want IA64 for normal applications, but for crunching large and complex numbers and equations, you can benefit by having everything in the registers and in cache.

Trolling and ignorance is not the same thing. FYI.

[Feanor]

Originally Posted by Ghost

It's 54 MB, not 54 mb. Difference between the two would be huge, but 54 mb isn't even possible.

Sorry for the error, not that familiar when it comes to B vs b.

Was impressed at how much this cpu is specialized.

[Aquinus]

Originally Posted by 3870x2

Trolling and ignorance is not the same thing. FYI.

Trolling and ignorance in many cases come hand in hand, mainly because someone posts about something that they have no knowledge of and have done no research on but try to act like they do. I consider that a form of trolling.

[zAAm]

Originally Posted by Aquinus

Trolling trolling trolling, people keep on trolling. Doh!

Itanium doesn't use x86, it uses IA64. Instead of x86 where a program is compiled and the pipeline and CPU determines what level of parallelism happens during execution. IA64's compiler determines the optimal way to execute the program at compilation which is why IA64 has a ridiculous number of registers and cache. Hardware usage is optimized at the compiler level so less needs to be done on the CPU itself eliminating a lot of overhead. You wouldn't want IA64 for normal applications, but for crunching large and complex numbers and equations, you can benefit by having everything in the registers and in cache.

I do know the differences between the IA64 architecture and x86, how is this trolling??

Intel is keeping Itanium for legacy support for mainframe customers running HP-UX/OpenVMS etc and custom mission-critical applications. As Xeon gets more of the current Itanium's "unique" availability and error correction features, customers will move away from it. They are already moving away from some of the Itanium's core ideas such as VLIW and scaled down the FPU with this chip while implementing RAS into Xeon. They even introduced more x86-esque runtime instruction ordering. Granted it will take a number of generations before a switch will take place, all I said was this is another step.

To elaborate my point, I'll quote Intel's Data Center Group GM, Kirk Skaugen:

We used to position Itanium as highest performance, highest reliability... We're still committed to Itanium. It's really now a choice of operating system. Xeon's reliability and performance is now equal [to]—and in some cases better than—Itanium, and they're going to leapfrog [each other] in performance over time.

If you like HP-UX, OpenVMS, Nonstop, and [other] mainframe operating systems, we're going to fully support you on Itanium. But now Xeon is in a space where there's no workload on the planet that Xeon can't handle.

Please refrain from jumping to conclusions immediately...

[TheGuruStud]

Keep sinking money into the Itanic. It will surely pay off

[Steevo]

Itanic, just as companies move to streaming processors like GCN or CUDA Intel finally has something to do with their already dated and slow hardware.

So what can this chip do that we can't already with massively parallel cores we already have?

[Aquinus]

Originally Posted by zAAm

I do know the differences between the IA64 architecture and x86, how is this trolling??

Intel is keeping Itanium for legacy support for mainframe customers running HP-UX/OpenVMS etc and custom mission-critical applications. As Xeon gets more of the current Itanium's "unique" availability and error correction features, customers will move away from it. They are already moving away from some of the Itanium's core ideas such as VLIW and scaled down the FPU with this chip while implementing RAS into Xeon. They even introduced more x86-esque runtime instruction ordering. Granted it will take a number of generations before a switch will take place, all I said was this is another step.

To elaborate my point, I'll quote Intel's Data Center Group GM, Kirk Skaugen:



Please refrain from jumping to conclusions immediately...

I apologize if you feel that way, but that isn't what you said. You're right, at some level there is x86-like instruction issuing, but the real key with Itanium is taking load off of the CPU and doing it when the program is compiled. Also x86 and IA64 are very different and behave in unique ways, but the architectures aren't going to be "merged" as you stated.

Originally Posted by zAAm

Just one step closer to the merging of Itanium and Xeon architectures...

[Steevo]

Originally Posted by Aquinus

I apologize if you feel that way, but that isn't what you said. You're right, at some level there is x86-like instruction issuing, but the real key with Itanium is taking load off of the CPU and doing it when the program is compiled. Also x86 and IA64 are very different and behave in unique ways, but the architectures aren't going to be "merged" as you stated.

They already have been merged for all physical intents and purposes, AMD APU, Open CL, Tesla, CUDA. Taking load off the CPU, what exactly do you think that means? That is what a CPU does, serial tasks, and there will always be there. However the other 80% of data is very parallel, and can be made to run faster on other hardware that isn't an Itanium.


We aren't waiting, the Itanium IS only around due to some companies throwing their money into that pot. Once it gets a proper burial we will be moving on with mach faster and better hardware.

[Thefumigator]

Originally Posted by Ghost

It's 54 MB, not 54 mb. Difference between the two would be huge, but 54 mb isn't even possible.

sorry for my ignorance but what is that?

[zAAm]

Originally Posted by Aquinus

I apologize if you feel that way, but that isn't what you said. You're right, at some level there is x86-like instruction issuing, but the real key with Itanium is taking load off of the CPU and doing it when the program is compiled. Also x86 and IA64 are very different and behave in unique ways, but the architectures aren't going to be "merged" as you stated.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you make the Itanium more Xeon-like and the Xeon more Itanium-like, that's merging...


EDIT: Just found this slide of Intel in another post that describes how Itanium and Xeon might be using the same sockets in future.

[Isenstaedt]

Originally Posted by btarunr

"In a world where businesses are increasingly dependent on IT for their competitive advantage, more and more business applications...

Anyone else read this with Don LaFontaine's voice?

[Katanai]

Originally Posted by TheGuruStud

Keep sinking money into the Itanic. It will surely pay off

To still think in 2012 that Itanium is in any way a failure is pure ignorance. This whole thread here reeks of it. I have just one question for you guys? Why do you think it's still being made? Do you honestly think that companies like to lose money? Itanium is and always was a success. All the rumors about it being a failure somehow were probably started by competitors who couldn't compete in this space. This comes from someone who has configured and sold Itanium systems guys. These chips are used in mission critical operations all over the world. You don't hear much about them because not everybody can afford them and not everybody needs them, they are not mainstream if you will and they are not that visible to the general public. But I bet that each one of you in this thread has used one, more than once. Each time you make a transaction with your credit card or you make a simple phone call, for example, chances are that at some point it passes through an Itanium system. These are super computers that offer maximum redundancy and extremely precise calculations and are used by many companies around the world as the center of their networks.

[Katanai]

Just to give you an idea of how they are being used here's an option to configure one of these systems, which offers maximum redundancy and is used where precise calculations are a matter of life and death, like in the aerospace and aeronautics fields: Let's say you have a system with 128 cores, if you select this option they become only 64 cores visible to the user. That's because each and every calculation is processed not by one core like in your PC right now but by two cores who work independent from one another on that same calculation. Now, each one of these systems has more cores in reserve, who are not normally accessible by the user, let's say 32. After the same calculation is done by each one of the two cores this third processing core does only one thing: checks to see if the two values are equal, that's what it does most of the time, a simple task which consumes very little energy. Now, if it happens that because of an errata those values are not equal that third core turns fully on and makes the calculation itself. Based on this result it decides which of the two results is the correct one and gives the ok for the operation to go further. You may find this unnecessary and it is, for example for your computer who doesn't ever do mission critical calculations. But what if that calculation is the trajectory of a rocket and an errata could cost astronauts their life? What if that calculation decides the value of your currency for that day because that system is the backbone of your stock market? In that case a simple misplaced comma or period could ruin the economy of a whole country. These are the types of scenarios where systems with Itanium chips are used, this is why it's a success and this is why you don't hear much about it: you are not the intended buyer for these things. There are no personal computers with Itanium chips in them...

[hellrazor]

Doesn't matter because itanium is shit.

[Katanai]

Originally Posted by hellrazor

Doesn't matter because itanium is shit.

Posts like this are one of the the reasons I don't regularly post on this forum anymore and just keep to the front page. Techpowerup was and is an awesome site, the community not anymore...

[Frick]

Originally Posted by Thefumigator

sorry for my ignorance but what is that?

One is megabit, the other megabyte.

Originally Posted by Katanai

Posts like this are one of the the reasons I don't regularly post on this forum anymore and just keep to the front page. Techpowerup was and is an awesome site, the community not anymore...

You are a wise, wise person.