Dvorak on Itanium

[isochar]

People said the same thing about the P4... and it has quickly changed its image with the release of Northwood. Itanium is the first attempt at a brand new technology, you can be sure that no one would have gotten it right on the first shot.

I for one am looking forward to the Itanium desktops so that the ~25 year old x86 platform can be put to rest.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Dogbert
Wombat,

Intel had a blooper.
The Itanium takes too much power and disipiates too much heat.
Too much heat = more fans. more fans mean more chances for failure.
When a fan fails, you lose a CPU either cause it's burned or it's shut down in order not to burn.

This is why the Itanium lost to Sparc and IBM chips in multi-cpu servers.
For smaller servers, people who went with sun tend to stay there and the others aren't too quick about leaving thir trusty x86 environment.

The Itanium is Intel's G200 - a fiasco.
Time for plan B...

Sorry Dogbert, but you flat out have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. IA-64 hasn't hit full time yet. Yes, Intel ****ed up with Merced. It was too slow for its release date to be a contender, but still makes a handy development platform.

You don't know who lost business to whom or why.

McKinley is a different beast entirely compared to Merced. Check conference presentations. For example:
They literally unplugged the fans in a McKinley system and it still ran. McKinley knows how to thermal throttle, and it does not shut down, it slows down, and reports that the system needs repair. Then again, this performance hit will only happen if the main and redundant systems fail simultaneously. There's a lot more going on, but I can only repeat here what I know has been made public.

Get a clue. I hope you don't parade your "knowledge" to others, because you have nothing but an uninformed opinion to offer.

[Dogbert]

Wombat,

Argue with them:

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-271443.html

http://www.electronicstimes.com/story/OEG20010810S0031

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2092954,00.html

[Dogbert]

By the way, after so many years in the business, I'd give Dvorak a bit more creadit. Most of the time, he knows his stuff.

[Dogbert]

Wombat, read this:

Intel's Plan B chip stirs internal debate
BY THERESE POLETTI
Mercury News
Tucked away in Hillsboro, Ore., a small team of Intel engineers has been quietly working on a chip technology that the giant semiconductor maker hopes will never see the light of day.

Intel's Yamhill Technology is a secret weapon against upcoming chips from rival Advanced Micro Devices. It's also a hedge against the possible failure of Intel's flashy new Itanium chips for computer servers, which have so far gotten a disappointing reception from customers and partners.

Unlike the Itanium, which uses a novel design that has some difficulty running software written for Intel's well-known Pentium family of chips, new chips with the Yamhill feature could easily handle the older programs as well as more sophisticated, memory-intensive games, database programs and scientific applications.

While having a Plan B might seem to be simple prudence -- especially at Intel, with its famed culture of paranoia -- the initiative is controversial within the company's Santa Clara headquarters.

Some Intel executives believe the Yamhill Technology's existence will be seen as a tacit admission that the Itanium, which took an estimated $1 billion and seven years to develop, might be a flop. In addition, the swashbuckling Intel doesn't like to admit that the much smaller AMD, based in Sunnyvale, could pose a real threat.

The Yamhill features are being built into the next version of Intel's Pentium chip, code-named Prescott, with an option to turn the features on or off. In 2003 or 2004, when the Prescott chip is expected to be available, Intel will evaluate AMD's offerings and the success of the Itanium and then decide whether to activate the Yamhill code.

But Intel's executives hope they never have to turn on the Yamhill features, said an engineer who worked on the secret project and has since left the company.

``I'd presume that they would only begrudgingly do anything with it at all. It will only be if the competition forces them,'' said the engineer, who agreed to discuss Yamhill only on condition of anonymity.


Huge market

At stake are billions of dollars a year in sales of the high-speed chips that serve as the brains for computer servers, a market which Intel and AMD have both targeted for future growth as personal computer sales flatten.

With its upcoming Hammer family, AMD is betting that server buyers want 64-bit chips compatible with Intel's popular Pentiums and Xeons and AMD's Athlons. Those chips, used in most of today's PCs and low-end servers, operate at 32 bits and are known as x86 designs, a reference to the names of early PC microprocessors, which all ended in the digits ``86.''

Intel is wagering on the Itanium, which also processes 64 bits of data at a time and has the added ability to execute many instructions simultaneously. The Itanium is designed to handle huge computing problems that require large amounts of memory, but it runs today's software more slowly.

Yamhill, named after a small town near an Oregon river of the same name, is Intel's backup plan. The extra features, called extensions, will make the Prescott chip a 64-bit chip compatible with Intel's traditional x86 designs, like AMD's Hammer, in case that's what customers really want.


No acknowledgment

Intel officials won't publicly acknowledge the Yamhill project, despite industry rumors of its existence. In the beginning, the small group of Yamhill engineers at Intel's Ronler Acres campus in Hillsboro worked in such secrecy that they could only refer to the technology as YT in e-mail or conversation. Talking in the halls about YT was forbidden, and engineers could not even tell their colleagues what they were working on.

An Intel spokesman declined to comment for this article, saying the chip maker doesn't comment on unannounced products.

But Ashok Kumar, an analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray who closely follows the chip industry, said he knew some details of the backup strategy. ``The thinking is it would give them more elbow room in extending the current architecture,'' he said.

Kevin Krewell, a senior analyst at MicroDesign Resources in San Jose, said he fully believes that Intel has a ``skunkworks project'' to extend the current x86 family into the 64-bit computing world.

``They would be foolish not to have a fallback plan,'' he said, adding that he does not have any direct knowledge of such a project. But ``Intel cannot admit that it is going on because it would undercut their Itanium program.''

In 1993, Intel decided that as computer programs got bigger and more complex, its microprocessors would need to do things differently. In the past, it had based its entire x86 chip family on a design that used Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) principles, which process instructions one at a time.

Intel also wanted to expand beyond its slowing PC chip business and enter the world of big, high-end servers, dominated today by Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) architecture, which is used by today's leading makers of big servers, including Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

RISC chips not only process multiple instructions at the same time but also run at 64 bits, meaning they can simultaneously process twice as much data as the standard 32-bit Intel chips. The 64-bit chips are particularly well-suited to server programs that require huge amounts of memory, such as big databases or computer-aided design software.

To meet the server challenge, Intel partnered with HP, which had devised a new architecture called Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) that combined the best of the other two architectures. The result was the Itanium.

So far, though, customers are not swarming to adopt the Itanium, which was formally launched last May after numerous delays and design problems. In the quarter ended Sept. 30, Gartner Dataquest estimates that Intel shipped about 2,162 Itanium chips, with 2,000 of those going to IBM for two big servers that use 1,000 Itaniums apiece.

``Itanium is not shipping where Intel wants it, not by any means,'' said Jef Hewitt, a Gartner Dataquest analyst. ``It won't be a world-shaker.''

Intel has always had low expectations for the first Itanium chip, but it has higher hopes for the next chip in the family, code-named McKinley, which is now being released in pilot systems.

Meanwhile, longtime foe AMD, a developer of Intel-compatible chips, has decided to extend the x86 CISC architecture into the 64-bit realm, going after the same market targeted by Itanium.

``All of the good ideas that made RISC run fast, people figured out how to put into CISC computers,'' said Fred Weber, AMD's chief technical officer. ``Time is clearly showing that changing the instruction set is not giving you any advantage in performance.''

While AMD is not expected to make inroads into the high-end server market, its Hammer chips, code-named SledgeHammer and ClawHammer, could further encroach on the desktop PC market, where AMD's Athlon has made big inroads in the past two years, and on the low-end server market, where Intel's Xeon chips have done well.


Engineers upset

Intel's decision to back the novel Itanium architecture had upset a small group of Intel engineers in Oregon, who preferred to build on the x86 legacy. When AMD released the specifications of its upcoming 64-bit chips in the summer of 2000, these ``cowboy'' engineers decided that Intel needed to match its rival. They began developing their own 64-bit extensions to the Pentium line, making sure the code was compatible with AMD's design.

The Oregon team's initiative inflamed the feud between them and the Santa Clara team developing the Itanium, according to former engineers. But top executives, including Chief Executive Craig Barrett, reluctantly decided to support Yamhill development in addition to Itanium.

Intel executives knew the value of a backup plan from the company's own history: two decades ago, Intel developed a chip called the i432 that was supposed to reshape its future but failed miserably. Intel rushed out another chip, the 8086, which took just three weeks to design, and that chip became its bread-and-butter.

Whether the Yamhill features are ultimately activated depends on how AMD's new chips are received in the market. Kumar believes that Yamhill-enabled Pentium chips would help Intel fight off that threat from AMD without hurting sales of Itaniums for high-end servers. ``There can be parallel efforts,'' he said.

I hope you have a hat so you coult eat it once the IA-64 fiasco is acknowledged.

[isochar]

You can't draw conclusions from the fact that Intel is making 64-bit extensions for its desktop processor line. IA-64 is a server processor...

[Kosh Naranek]

excatly right ...


I don't understand why people (dogbert ?) are getting so exicted about Intels x86-64 plans ?

When anyone mention these plans they talk about a plan B and Itanium fiasco as though these were related.


If AMD's x86-64 solution is a logic, and the next best thing to sliced bread, solution then why isn't an Intel based x86-64 that too?
and if Intel does make a x86-64 CPU they will hopefully keep the Itanium in the game.(I just love EPIC)


When/if AMD decides to enter the pure 64 bit business (which I doubt) then I wonder what people will say.

[Wombat]

You quoted zdnet, and cnet, who were both paraphrasing the same guy. Not only were the two articles focused on Merced, but they were chock full of factual errors. I don't need to argue with pathetic and out-of-date resources, they're self-deprecating. Go do your research and find out what people think now, and what McKinley can do compared to Merced.

As for yamhill, it's not an IA-64 replacement. I don't mind them doing it, since it's got to be a cheap insurance policy, assuming it even exists. I never said IA-64 was a small investment. BTW, it's called the "Murky" News for good reason.

Dvorak may "know his stuff most of the time" but he's wrong now. I've never paid attention to him before, and i see no reason he might deserve my attention now. I've got a McKinley here sitting on my desk, I'm confident in my opinions, and don't have to rely on rumor mills for my facts.

I'll be there shoving the entire hat rack down your throat.

(edited for spelling)

[isochar]

Pic?

[Kosh Naranek]

------> McKinley

I'll be there shoving the entire hat rack down your throat.

Can I watch ?

[Wombat]

Sorry isochar, we don't allow any cameras in the buildings, for obvious reasons.

[ALBPM]

Wombat does know his shit.....


And, I'm busy making those Processors down here right now!!!!

Paul

[Dogbert]

I've got a McKinley here sitting on my desk, I'm confident in my opinions, and don't have to rely on rumor mills for my facts.

Exactly what I thought. And Intel employee who knows "HIS FACTS".
When I'll see a McKinley review from Dell instead, I'll believe.
In house successes are woth nil.
You have a McKonley workstation which you didn't pay for, and which you propably don't even know it's maintenence cost.

I'll wait for a review from ZDnet anyhow. Besides, even if it's all but lies remember this: People don't easily beieve the creator. People easily believe "unbiased" sources. Even if they lie, it's enough that they repeat the lie that many times so people believe it's truth.

Intel has two problems, bad cpu and bad PR.
Too bad we don't have an AMD employee in the forums as well.

Wombat, think before you flame.

[KvHagedorn]

but the server-class reliability just doesn't seem to be there.

Upon what basis do you claim that? I know you are on the McKinley team at HP, so it's hard for you to be objective, but what sort of servers are we talking about here? The problem with this line of reasoning in the first place is one of cost for performance. To implement an Itanium system, one must purchase a very expensive and proprietary (for now) set of hardware components. Then there's software. It all has to be brand new. Any new or proprietary software must be rewritten for IA-64 to take advantage of ANY of its true benefits (the many registers and massive parallelism), and this makes it a very difficult architecture to compile for. I would even say that it may be prohibitively impractical to realize Itanium's performance potential, due to its architecture's incredible complexity. There are massive costs associated with migrating to the IA-64 platform. With a Sledgehammer system, you would have a much lower hardware cost to implement the system, and the entire legacy of X86 to draw upon for software, including the many varieties of X86 Unix and their associated applications. Even if we go with your assumption that the Hammer system would be less reliable, the total costs to the customer would probably be less if he purchased TWO Hammer based systems running redundantly than a single Itanium system.

IA-64 is not for your average consumer. It's not even for your "cutting-edge" consumer. It's for the same guys that have been buying the big boxes for years. Anybody that thinks that they will have an IA-64 as their home desktop over the next few years has made a grevious(sp?) mistake.

The amount of time and resources Intel has poured into IA-64 over the past 10 years boggles the mind. If this whole architecture was never destined for anything but the very high end of the server market, Intel has wasted their investment. They will never sell enough volume in this super high end market to justify the billions spent. In my humble (but realistic) opinion, Intel management has simply been pig-headed about the whole affair. This is their baby and they don't want it to die no matter how ugly it is. And to think that they just bought the most impressive chip architecture I have ever seen in the Alpha EV8 design and are going to just kill it.. the foolishness of this boggles the mind. It's exactly like Harry Potter's muggle aunt and uncle favoring their own fat ugly stupid brat over the clearly better kid Harry (who they just sort of inherited), except this is business, which makes it look even more ridiculous than Harry's aunt and uncle looked. (Sorry if this comparison offends you, Rob.. but it's really not your ugly baby.. you just have to babysit for the thing.)

Intel clearly meant for IA-64 to take over the desktop around the 2010 timeframe. If not, why even mess with it? I would love to have something better take over for the X86 architecture, but I really don't see it happening anytime soon. I had been rooting (in my wildest dreams) for Alpha to take this role.. what a shame.

In comparison, people that buy servers buy whatever meets their needs the best, and the software is generally custom-tailored to that.

Again this favors Hammer over Itanium. On both counts.

One of the very moot points people often bring up about Hammer is that there are no operating systems for it. Well it runs anything 32 bit, including Windows, faster than any other processor, plus check this out.. Yes, boys and girls, there is an AMD64 Windows XP. Linux and FreeBSD will be available too, in 64 bit versions for Hammer. And programmers have said how wonderfully easy X86-64 is to program for..

Sorry, NDA.

You mean everyone else is allowed to talk about Yamhill except you? You don't even work for Intel, Rob.

[Dogbert]

KvHagedorn,

Whow, you read even through the AcesHardware's forums...
/me bows before you.
You're like <a href="http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/the_characters/html/character3.html#garbage" target="_blank"> The garbage man</a> !