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Viability of Itanium-- was Intel found to be abusing market power in Japan
On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 03:53:34 GMT, "Delbert Cecchi"
wrote: "Robert Myers" wrote in message .. . On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 01:17:28 GMT, "Delbert Cecchi" wrote: snip Do you think the HP enterprise servers have the critical mass to support Itanium development, if Intel were to back away? IBM had to converge, Sun is getting wobbly about sparc or so it seems. I have a very hard time imagining a scenario in which Intel walks away from Itanium. Just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it won't happen. Why would Intel stay with it? Desktop and small servers belongs to x86-64 from Intel and AMD. Anybody but HP making serious noises about using Itanium? http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050318/221/fehj1.html quote Within the past four years, there have probably been more stories questioning the long-term viability of the Sparc and Itanium architectures than any other architecture in the past several decades, aside from the S/390 mainframe. Both Fujitsu Corp and Siemens AG (Xetra: 723610.DE - news) , the Japanese and German counterparts in the Fujitsu-Siemens partnership, are long-term planners that move slowly and methodically. And they both have every intention of making some money selling Sparc and Itanium servers for the foreseeable future. /quote http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/...mequest_1.html quote Fujitsu to launch new PrimeQuest Itanium servers Slated to be announced April 5, PrimeQuest will be company's first high-end Itanium 2 systems /quote Then there is SGI, of course. I assume that the Altix line will survive somewhere, and that it will use Itanium, if it's available. Any of that amounts to critical mass? I don't think so. Either Intel finds a way for Dell to sell Itanium systems that is profitable for Dell, or that's it for Itanium, but don't underestimate Dell/Intel. The incentive for Dell, other than being obedient to Santa Clara, is that it wants to be in the higher margin businesses just like everybody else does. Opteron hasn't yet and may not ever penetrate much beyond the 2 and 4-way space. That's the next line of defense. If Dell as a volume purveyor of bigger SMP boxes is the way it goes down, Dell will wind up killing margin rather than capturing it, as it always does. Intel manages to establish Itanium as the worthy competitor to Power it wants it to be, Dell creates the value proposition for itanium, and all hell breaks loose again. Or not. One indicator will be market penetration by Opteron in the 8-way space and higher, and how Intel reacts. x86 is already getting hardware virtualization. If x86 starts to acquire the RAS features Intel now intends only for Itanium, we will know that Itanium is dead. HP is sort of stuck, having ported all that stuff from Alpha and PA and nonstop to Itanium, but I don't see anyone else in that boat. The alternatives a use x86 for mainframe applications (politically unacceptable, IMHO), continue investing in Sparc, or become dependent on IBM. RM |
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Robert Myers wrote:
Opteron hasn't yet and may not ever penetrate much beyond the 2 and 4-way space. That's the next line of defense. If Dell as a volume purveyor of bigger SMP boxes is the way it goes down, Dell will wind up killing margin rather than capturing it, as it always does. Intel manages to establish Itanium as the worthy competitor to Power it wants it to be, Dell creates the value proposition for itanium, and all hell breaks loose again. Or not. One indicator will be market penetration by Opteron in the 8-way space and higher, and how Intel reacts. Well, with dual-core, Opteron will be 8-way capable, right? That's getting to be a serious box! |
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On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 10:13:29 -0600, chrisv wrote:
Robert Myers wrote: Opteron hasn't yet and may not ever penetrate much beyond the 2 and 4-way space. That's the next line of defense. If Dell as a volume purveyor of bigger SMP boxes is the way it goes down, Dell will wind up killing margin rather than capturing it, as it always does. Intel manages to establish Itanium as the worthy competitor to Power it wants it to be, Dell creates the value proposition for itanium, and all hell breaks loose again. Or not. One indicator will be market penetration by Opteron in the 8-way space and higher, and how Intel reacts. Well, with dual-core, Opteron will be 8-way capable, right? That's getting to be a serious box! Opteron is 8-way capable today, but the mechanics get a little problematic. There is no reason to assume that a dual-Opteron can't reach 8-way on a 4-W board. If you're thinking of a 16P system, AIUI, it's not going to happen. There would have to be changes to the coherent HT links for that to happen. I don't see it, but... -- Keith |
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keith wrote:
Opteron is 8-way capable today, but the mechanics get a little problematic. There is no reason to assume that a dual-Opteron can't reach 8-way on a 4-W board. If you're thinking of a 16P system, AIUI, it's not going to happen. There would have to be changes to the coherent HT links for that to happen. I don't see it, but... Or an external chipset, like Horus, or Serverworks/Sun's new chipset. Yousuf Khan |
#5
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On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 07:04:09 -0500, Yousuf Khan wrote:
keith wrote: Opteron is 8-way capable today, but the mechanics get a little problematic. There is no reason to assume that a dual-Opteron can't reach 8-way on a 4-W board. If you're thinking of a 16P system, AIUI, it's not going to happen. There would have to be changes to the coherent HT links for that to happen. I don't see it, but... Or an external chipset, like Horus, or Serverworks/Sun's new chipset. Okay, but we aren't talking about the same thing anymore. AIUI, the AMD NUMA architecture is sufficiently UMA to be UMA as long as the local interconnects (hypertransport) are used. Once another bridge is used, this breaks down and we really have a NUMA system. No? -- Keith Yousuf Khan |
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keith wrote:
Or an external chipset, like Horus, or Serverworks/Sun's new chipset. Okay, but we aren't talking about the same thing anymore. AIUI, the AMD NUMA architecture is sufficiently UMA to be UMA as long as the local interconnects (hypertransport) are used. Once another bridge is used, this breaks down and we really have a NUMA system. No? Well, even if they used bog-standard Hypertransport to try and go beyond 8P, they may find that the number of hops makes a difference to the latency that would take it outside of the domain of Sufficiently UMA. However, there is some talk that the next generation Opterons will be able to connect to 32-processors all by itself. That would likely indicate that AMD is planning to increase the number of external HTT channels per processor. Yousuf Khan |
#7
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"Robert Myers" wrote in message
... If Dell as a volume purveyor of bigger SMP boxes is the way it goes down, Dell will wind up killing margin rather than capturing it, as it always does. "Killing margin" is an interesting phrase. A synonym is "eliminating the middleman markup", which some would see as a desirable goal. Many americans deplore the disappearance of small outlets with high markups, but then the same americans do all their shopping at Walmart. One indicator will be market penetration by Opteron in the 8-way space and higher I too favor the glueless NUMA SMP configurations made possible by Opterons, including 8-way. But when I think of an 8-way motherboard, I think of a farmer showing up with a John Deere tractor, planning to plow the back 40. ;-) And when I think of 8-way Opterons on more than one mobo, I worry about high-speed link connections between boards. I believe I've been reassured before on this NG that such connections are possible. Has this been proven? Are production systems being shipped with 8-way Opterons on multiple boards? |
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Felger Carbon wrote:
"Robert Myers" wrote in message ... If Dell as a volume purveyor of bigger SMP boxes is the way it goes down, Dell will wind up killing margin rather than capturing it, as it always does. "Killing margin" is an interesting phrase. A synonym is "eliminating the middleman markup", which some would see as a desirable goal. Many americans deplore the disappearance of small outlets with high markups, but then the same americans do all their shopping at Walmart. One indicator will be market penetration by Opteron in the 8-way space and higher I too favor the glueless NUMA SMP configurations made possible by Opterons, including 8-way. But when I think of an 8-way motherboard, I think of a farmer showing up with a John Deere tractor, planning to plow the back 40. ;-) And when I think of 8-way Opterons on more than one mobo, I worry about high-speed link connections between boards. I believe I've been reassured before on this NG that such connections are possible. Has this been proven? Are production systems being shipped with 8-way Opterons on multiple boards? I read an article somewhere about an 8-way Opteron system that had two stacked 4P boards. I thought it was an HP system, but I looked just now and couldn't find anything with more than 4P at HP's site. It was probably just a review of something demoed at a show like LinuxWorld and not yet - if ever - available in the retail channel. |
#9
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"Robert Myers" wrote in message ... snip Either Intel finds a way for Dell to sell Itanium systems that is profitable for Dell, or that's it for Itanium, but don't underestimate Dell/Intel. The incentive for Dell, other than being obedient to Santa Clara, is that it wants to be in the higher margin businesses just like everybody else does. They can enter those higher margin businesses with the X86-64 from Intel, whatever the code name is. Opteron hasn't yet and may not ever penetrate much beyond the 2 and 4-way space. That's the next line of defense. If Dell as a volume purveyor of bigger SMP boxes is the way it goes down, Dell will wind up killing margin rather than capturing it, as it always does. Go to your strength. Dell's is having the most efficient, lowest cost, most turns, lowest inventory manufacturing. That allows them to compete on price. Near as I can tell, not much added value functionality in a Dell. As opposed to a Del. :-) In a commodity type market that is a great advantage. Intel manages to establish Itanium as the worthy competitor to Power it wants it to be, Dell creates the value proposition for itanium, and all hell breaks loose again. Or not. One indicator will be market penetration by Opteron in the 8-way space and higher, and how Intel reacts. x86 is already getting hardware virtualization. If x86 starts to acquire the RAS features Intel now intends only for Itanium, we will know that Itanium is dead. Have you reviewed the "Hurricane" chip set stuff from IBM? Lots of RAS and it uses X86-64. HP is sort of stuck, having ported all that stuff from Alpha and PA and nonstop to Itanium, but I don't see anyone else in that boat. The alternatives a use x86 for mainframe applications (politically unacceptable, IMHO), continue investing in Sparc, or become dependent on IBM. HP is investing in Sparc? Or is that what is in a nonstop box? RM |
#10
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In comp.sys.intel Delbert Cecchi wrote:
HP is investing in Sparc? Or is that what is in a nonstop box? Ah, no... I believe NonStop boxes use MIPS CPUs, slated IIRC to migrate to Itanium. rick jones BTW, I would have thought that in this context the value-add is from Delbert - value-add from Del seems to be over in comp.arch -- The glass is neither half-empty nor half-full. The glass has a leak. The real question is "Can it be patched?" these opinions are mine, all mine; HP might not want them anyway... feel free to post, OR email to raj in cup.hp.com but NOT BOTH... |
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