Intel Unveils Itanium 2 9100-Series

[HellasVagabond]

Intel has revealed its latest Montvale-based processor line. The new Montvale-based processors (which will replace the current Montecito-based processors) retain the Itanium 2 name, but with a different processor number. Montvale-based processors will carry the 9100-series processor number to differentiate from the Montecito-based 9000-series. The new Itanium 2 9100-series has minor upgrades over the 9000-series such as a faster 667 MHz front-side bus and the demand Based Switching with Enhanced Intel Speedstep Technology that allows the higher-end Itanium 2 9100-series models to enter a low-power state when idle.
Intel will continue to manufacture the Itanium 2 9100-series on a 90nm fabrication process, as with Montecito.



The lowest end Itanium models are the Itanium 2 9120N which runs at a 1.42 GHz clock speed with a 533/400 MHz front-side bus and a 12MB iL3 cache and the Itanium 2 9110N which runs at 1.60 GHz clock speed a 533/400 MHz front-side bus and a 12MB of iL3 cache. It also has

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[Atech]

Jeez @ those prices. Intel wonders why no one was scrambling to jump over to IA-64

 

[lemonadesoda]

I think most people in this forum have no idea about what/how/why these processors. If TPU wants to post this type of news... I think it needs to be ready to make more information available that is of interest to TPU members.

i.e.... show us the benchies

Get a IA-64 box running 2003 or Vista and show us how "good" these things are... or are not.

If there are any answers like "oh, this type of processor isn't for xyz, its meant for specialist datacentre applications..." etc. then, quite honestly, it's not "TPU" news.

 

[Nothgrin]

Those prices show that cache is directly porportional to cash

 

[WarEagleAU]

eh maybe so lemonade. I know these are server procs...but they arent running really fast speeds. Makes me wonder what their use is for. OF course, I expect Dan to make a post on here detailing this some more...so Ill wait for his thread.

 

[Atech]

eh maybe so lemonade. I know these are server procs...but they arent running really fast speeds. Makes me wonder what their use is for. OF course, I expect Dan to make a post on here detailing this some more...so Ill wait for his thread.

Here's an Arstechnica comparison of Itanium vs SPARC.

Edit:
Another one, which I hadn't read before now, overviewing IA-64.

 

[Solaris17]

i really hope dan posts he uses this type of stuff idk bout u guys but iv always been facinated with xeons and itiums i mean were do they stand? are they better than xeons? oc more? how high better because of clock cycle? what arch do these and xeons run on? can they be desktop chips? how do they score in cpu intensive stuff? wwwww?

 

[kwchang007]

i really hope dan posts he uses this type of stuff idk bout u guys but iv always been facinated with xeons and itiums i mean were do they stand? are they better than xeons? oc more? how high better because of clock cycle? what arch do these and xeons run on? can they be desktop chips? how do they score in cpu intensive stuff? wwwww?

I think it's the system's they're supposed to run with (os wise). Also, I think they were supposed to be geared towards 64 bit calculations and floating point. I think....don't quote me on that (I'd really like to see what Dan says...). Ok from wikipedia....I have gained that Itanium is an enterprise sever chip. It has protections against false branch predictions (not so bad of a problem if it happens), it also has the massive cache. It has a super wide pipline, it can execute up to 6 process at once. That's all I've got in ways of advancement of our consumer cpus.

 

[Atech]

i really hope dan posts he uses this type of stuff idk bout u guys but iv always been facinated with xeons and itiums i mean were do they stand? are they better than xeons? oc more? how high better because of clock cycle? what arch do these and xeons run on? can they be desktop chips? how do they score in cpu intensive stuff? wwwww?

Read the links I posted It's basically another evolution in ISA philosophy.

CISC > RISC > EPIC.

First of all, chuck out stupid overly complex CISC instructions. Think instruction level parallelism. 128 exposed (non-rename) registers. Lots of execution units and a linearly increasable number thereof. Chuck out branch prediction and allow the compiler to tell the processor exactly what to do. Now unroll all loops, add a lot of cache and get the processor to perform both instructions from a logical op (and use the result that's returned from the parent argument instead of waiting) and you have EPIC. It's a bit more complicated than that but that's the gist of it.

Think of it as SPARC on steroids.

 

[Solaris17]

ooo sparc systems...my cousin (IT guy) has a sun rig with an ultra sparc 3 it has like 2 or 4 cores (way back b4 amd had dual core the a64 rigs just came out) and it was clocked at like 800 mhz running solaris10 i used it and omg noooo comparison it was sooo f#$% fast way beyond x8 land i think it was i6xx instead of i386 and it was amazing...now sparc has 16 core processorts and my cousin is getting like a sunblade6000 server platform with the new/old sparc 5 8 cores at like 1.2 ghz i whanna play sooo bad

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

I think most people in this forum have no idea about what/how/why these processors. If TPU wants to post this type of news... I think it needs to be ready to make more information available that is of interest to TPU members.

i.e.... show us the benchies

Get a IA-64 box running 2003 or Vista and show us how "good" these things are... or are not.

If there are any answers like "oh, this type of processor isn't for xyz, its meant for specialist datacentre applications..." etc. then, quite honestly, it's not "TPU" news.

Goodluck getting these to run windows vista.. These are true 64 bit CPU's. Unlike x86-64's mutilation of 64 bit

I'm quite interested in Itanium, PowerPC, and misc server related news like this.

But then again, most people like to think my interests are pure fruitzilla fanboi-ism.

24Mb L3 cache, baby. HUZZAH!

 

[Nothgrin]

way back in the old days when P4 was still in use the FIRST Itanium @ 733MHz was able to do more FLOPS than 500 P4 1.8GHz

 

[lemonadesoda]

Goodluck getting these to run windows vista.. HUZZAH!

Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based Systems is well-suited for native 64-bit applications requiring the highest levels of reliability, availability, and scalability. With systems available that support up to 64-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and 1 terabyte of memory, Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based Systems is the most scalable version of the Windows platform. Typical workloads include database and business applications

SOMEBODY LOAD WINDOWS ONTO A ITANIUM 2 9100 AND SHOW US SOME SCREENIES AND BENCHIES!!!!

 

[lemonadesoda]

way back in the old days when P4 was still in use the FIRST Itanium @ 733MHz was able to do more FLOPS than 500X P4 1.8GHz

OH BABY! I was about to buy a Core 2 Quad, but now I'm hot for IA-64, so long as it runs MS Office, Adobe CS2/3 and DX9.

Now there's the rib! Does Itanium Hardware have AGP or PCI express and do any drivers exist. :-(

http://www.microsoft.com/servers/64bit/faqs.mspx

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

OH BABY! I was about to buy a Core 2 Quad, but now I'm hot for IA-64, so long as it runs MS Office, Adobe CS2/3 and DX9.

Now there's the rib! Does Itanium Hardware have AGP or PCI express and do any drivers exist. :-(

http://www.microsoft.com/servers/64bit/faqs.mspx

And windows server 2003 != Windows Vista.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Itanium/E8870/i2DML-8G2.cfm

That, my friend, is a real server.

 

[Nothgrin]

OH BABY! I was about to buy a Core 2 Quad, but now I'm hot for IA-64, so long as it runs MS Office, Adobe CS2/3 and DX9.

Now there's the rib! Does Itanium Hardware have AGP or PCI express and do any drivers exist. :-(

http://www.microsoft.com/servers/64bit/faqs.mspx

Theres the one downfall of Itaniums because the Itanium motherboards only support server hardware. They have PCI-X slots which are mainly used for Gigabit Ethernet and fibre channel controller cards. I dont believe the PCI-X work with PCI-Express and most of them have onboard video. PCI-X however is somewhat backwards compatible with old school PCI so you can get a PCI video card...

 

[kwchang007]

OH BABY! I was about to buy a Core 2 Quad, but now I'm hot for IA-64, so long as it runs MS Office, Adobe CS2/3 and DX9.

Now there's the rib! Does Itanium Hardware have AGP or PCI express and do any drivers exist. :-(

http://www.microsoft.com/servers/64bit/faqs.mspx

I wouldn't recommend it. One, not so many chipsets out there (probably don't support pci-e). Two, look at the fsb speeds, you're probably going to end up maxing that out. Three, do you have $910 for one? Four, I bet they use buffered dimms. The list goes on.....get your quad core