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#141
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Is Itanium the first 64-bit casualty?
In article
, MitchAlsup wrote: As one who has architected, designed and built RISCs from two (or 3) major RISC architectures, and x86-64 high end processors: It is my considered opinion, that the overhead of x86 is no where near as big as you are making it out to be. I consider x86-64 with SSE... to be EASIER to implement than SPARC-V9 with VIS--and in this case I have actual experience at both. Now there may be some RISC somewhere that is easier to implement than the SPARC, but your contention is that that architecture is so much easier that the pure mass of volume in x86-land simply can never make up the difference. This is patently FALSE. Looks like Sparc is the first to die, not Itanic as this thread claims. Sun Micro kills 'Rock' high-end chip project--NYT http://www.reuters.com/article/marke...0090615?rpc=44 Of course when Itanic dies no one will "officially" notice, there just wont be another upgrade for HPs big servers. Core2 chips will take over. Fujitsu will still be selling a Sparc chip long after Itanic dies, so it all depends on how you classify death. Brett |
#142
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Is Itanium the first 64-bit casualty?
On Jun 21, 12:40*pm, Robert Redelmeier wrote:
Robert Myers wrote in part: On Jun 17, 10:26*am, daytripper wrote: And yet you, without hesitation, characterize who I am, as if you knew me. * I do from your posts. *I'm unconvinced you know how you appear to others. *Or perhaps you seek negative feedback. At my age, I have a pretty good idea of how people react to me. With the help of paid assistance, I even have some insight as to why. As with anyone you will ever speak to, you have no idea of the whole story. If you did know the whole story, perhaps you would be more tolerant--and perhaps not. There are lots of people in technical disciplines who have all kinds of problems with others, and many are very, very bright. None are deserving of the abuse they get from those who should be capable of better. If you've ever found a serious bug in a computer program, you know how badly some apparently unimportant little thing can screw things up. You have also "explained" to me the meaning of words uttered No. *I have explained to you the meaning I take from those words. *Your interpretation is not the only one. That's true of all words ever uttered, and it's possible that I don't understand the words you wanted to explain to me, but I *have* actually spoken directly to the person in question about them. by someone whom I know personally and you don't. I'm shocked you would verbally abuse someone you actually personally knew. *My estimation of you has dropped even further. I am *truly* sorry that you feel abused. My estimation of your defenses was that your defense in depth puts you beyond the possibility of verbal abuse. If I was wrong, please accept my humble apologies. You know *everything* with absolute certainty--except yourself. You have it reversed. *I know myself with reasonable certainty. *Everything else is doubtful. That's solipsism, and you in particular know yourself not at all, so thoroughly are you surrounded by what a psychiatrist would call defenses. There is no perhaps about it. *If you don't like my style of discussion, don't talk to me. *The idea that you would try to "discipline" a total stranger is revolting. You reject the basis of all society, large and small scale? Of course not. The basis of society is power and a complex set of psychological interactions that allow someone to obtain one or more allies. The more allies you have, the more you can claim you are in the right. That is the basis of society, and it makes little difference whether I reject it or not. It is the way people and most particularly mobs and gangs behave. I've stood up to lots tougher than you--and *lots* smarter. Someone on a religious list asked me where I would find someone pure enough for my taste. I did not give the answer that, for the context, would have been immune to dispute. For purposes of this discussion, the same answer that I gave there will serve: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope When I get near hardware, just like when I get near other people's theories, I am sometimes able to point out things the hardware builders haven't understood because they figured they'd just "look it up in the back of Hildebrand" when they needed to. *That's my place in the world. *People who think they know what they're doing do all *kinds* of things they don't understand, sometimes with catastrophic results. Everyone _loves_ a critic. *NOT! * Your attitude even undermines your own effectiveness. I have seen many more effective critics. Where did I say that everyone loves a critic? That's ridiculous. People hate criticism, and they should. Most criticism, as in the case of your criticism of me, is counter-productive. Someone should write a book, "How to lie with data." It's pretty easy. I was written before you were born and became a best-seller: * "How to Lie with Statistics" *Darrell Huff [Norton] You really *are* clueless. I know about "How to Lie with Statistics," and I was, in fact, making an allusion to it. My point was that you don't even have to bother with statistics. You can just point to data and use your imagination. Or, you can just tell a bald-faced lie that treats the data as little more than a pretty picture. Computer graphics, in particular, have encouraged that last practice. As to when I was born, you have no idea who you are talking to, where I've been or what I've done in life, both good and bad. It's truly fortunate in this instance that my name is so common. I don't want you or anyone else digging. My life could make a shelf full of books. I could drop names endlessly. I took complex variables sitting next to and as a personal friend of a person who is widely credited with a contribution without which the Internet would not function at all. I've been a disappointment to just about everyone, precisely because of the perverse personality traits to which you react without fail. Robert Myers. |
#143
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Is Itanium the first 64-bit casualty?
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Wilco Dijkstra wrote: [attribution lost] Part of the problem might also be that proprietary closed-source code such as what exists under Windows, and within Windows itself, has taken so many shortcuts that quick easy translation is not feasible. Windows itself and most of its components have been ported many times in the past to various 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, so the source code is already clean. Compiling for a different target is as simple as selecting the right switches in VC++. So why don't we see this more often? If it's as simple as selecting a different compiler switch, then it shouldn't cost too much money for an application developer to run the source through a few different switches. Compiling isn't the big problem; shipping a product for multiple architectures means you have to do QA and support for each of them, and that multiplies your costs. Even closed-source vendors for the UNIX world typically only support a handful of systems because supporting _all_ of them is simply not feasible. I also run a 64-bit Linux on all of my machines, and this version is just as well supported as the 32-bit version. Of course the big difference being that this is open-source. There is no big difference between open and proprietary in terms of porting. Either can be very easy to port or very hard, depending on how well it was written. In theory, yes. In practice, more open-source is more easily ported. .... because a closed-source vendor has to do all the work of porting, testing, etc., while anyone who wants to run an open-source app on a new system can make any necessary changes themselves and share them with others. Also, with the huge body of portable code out there to be viewed by new open-source coders, better habits develop and new code is more likely to be portable than an insular closed-source environment where the code only has to work on one system and that's all the coders see. S -- Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Isaac Jaffe |
#144
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Is Itanium the first 64-bit casualty?
Bill Todd wrote in
news:IMadnRLLI60Feq3XnZ2dnUVZ_hmdnZ2d@metrocastcab levision.com: It took a lengthy, consistent string of missed schedules and dashed performance hopes just to slow it enough to give x86-64 and POWER the chance to demonstrate clear superiority: had Itanic managed to fulfill just one original promise (e.g., of significantly better efficiency due to simpler instruction scheduling) that might have been sufficient to make the world follow it where they so obviously expected to. I can't argue with that. I know one senior person who survived the DEC-CPQ-HP transitions. The surrender to Itanic was not just about the promised gains of Itanium, it was the 'addition by subtraction' of costs needed to stay in the workstation and server markets. Not only could DEC get rid of the burden of its own fabs, it could also get out of needeing to design, debug and manufacture the various enterprise servers, mid- range servers, low-end servers and desktops that were all deemed necessary. They were seeing such poor ROI on those efforts, they felt whatever meagre cash they could make by selling rebadged Intel boxes and services for those customers would be a better market than the ones they then held. I was told in the EV6 server era, DEC was making more money selling storage units than the servers, truly a case of the tail wagging the dog, but it was the cash that mattered. They felt if they could get a high quality server via Intel and/or HP, then selling storage and service and software would be a pretty strong business. I think the Itanic was not only its own failures to deliver, but also AMD64. The 4-way, 64-bit Opteron servers really undercut everything but the enterprise class market. Once this became clear, even Intel stoked up the x86-64 fires and back-burnered the Itanic. Fast-foward to today where we see Nehalem is shipping long before Tukwila. -- Lee |
#145
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Is Itanium the first 64-bit casualty?
On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 23:20:40 +0000 (UTC), Lee Witten wrote:
Bill Todd wrote in news:IMadnRLLI60Feq3XnZ2dnUVZ_hmdnZ2d@metrocastca blevision.com: It took a lengthy, consistent string of missed schedules and dashed performance hopes just to slow it enough to give x86-64 and POWER the chance to demonstrate clear superiority: had Itanic managed to fulfill just one original promise (e.g., of significantly better efficiency due to simpler instruction scheduling) that might have been sufficient to make the world follow it where they so obviously expected to. I can't argue with that. I know one senior person who survived the DEC-CPQ-HP transitions. The surrender to Itanic was not just about the promised gains of Itanium, it was the 'addition by subtraction' of costs needed to stay in the workstation and server markets. Not only could DEC get rid of the burden of its own fabs, it could also get out of needeing to design, debug and manufacture the various enterprise servers, mid- range servers, low-end servers and desktops that were all deemed necessary. They were seeing such poor ROI on those efforts, they felt whatever meagre cash they could make by selling rebadged Intel boxes and services for those customers would be a better market than the ones they then held. I was told in the EV6 server era, DEC was making more money selling storage units than the servers, truly a case of the tail wagging the dog, but it was the cash that mattered. They felt if they could get a high quality server via Intel and/or HP, then selling storage and service and software would be a pretty strong business. I think the Itanic was not only its own failures to deliver, but also AMD64. The 4-way, 64-bit Opteron servers really undercut everything but the enterprise class market. Once this became clear, even Intel stoked up the x86-64 fires and back-burnered the Itanic. Fast-foward to today where we see Nehalem is shipping long before Tukwila. -- Lee DEC never sold a single Itanium-based anything... |
#146
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Is Itanium the first 64-bit casualty?
daytripper wrote in
: DEC never sold a single Itanium-based anything... Indeed not. I may get the dates jumbled a bit, but it was the CPQ regime who decided to kill the Alpha and go with Itanium. Shortly thereafter CPQ and HP decided to merge. IIRC there were a few CPQ Merced boxes manufactured, but clearly no DEC ones. IIRC the decision to go to Itanium was made when EV7/21264 was in development. A lot of the CPU and systems designers saw that for what it was and headed on to greener pastures. Finding new jobs wasn't too hard expecially if you were willing to relocate, DEC/CPQ had a long series of pay freezes in place so these folks were relatively underpaid. -- Lee |
#147
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Is Itanium the first 64-bit casualty?
On Jun 15, 7:40*am, Terje Mathisen "terje.mathisen at tmsw.no"
wrote: I just noticed (at the time) that it seemed to deliver less performance than it had been promised to do, even when measured in MIPS/GHz, and this is why I stated that it seemed to be too complex to get to work as Intel/HP hoped/promised that it would do. Sorry to pick this up so late. I don't think that the problem with P4 and Itanium was as simple as that they couldn't clock it faster, although I'm sure that's part of the story. The problem (from my armchair architect point of view) is that Intel was always forced into design choices it didn't want to make because of the active transistor/ power budget. I base my conclusion about P4 on comments by Bob Colwell and comments by a lurking IBM alumnus who shall remain nameless. I *know* that power consumption was a design problem for Itanium, and I speculate, based on what I think I know about P4, that it affected the design and not just the clock rate of Itanium. As with everything I've ever said in my entire life, I could be wrong, but that's my stubborn opinion. In the end, the design they had envisioned in their mind's eyes just couldn't be squeezed into the transistor budget, and the reason was power consumption. That's the smoking gun of Itanium, in my best (amateur's) guess. I doubt if anyone who really knows is ever going to tell us. Robert. |
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