Xeon vs. Itanium?

Hi all,

Intel just announced the Itanium 2 9015 today.
It has VT-i, Dual Core and 2 threads per core
and it runs at 1.4GHz with 12M of cache and
a 400MHz FSB and a price of $749.

Which Xeon specs comes closest to it in
"horsepower" assuming that the graphics,
amount of ram and the speed of the hd sub-
systems are equal?

later.....

"Benjamin Gawert" wrote in message
...
* ***** charles:

Intel just announced the Itanium 2 9015 today.

intel has annouced much mo
Itanium2 9010, FSB400/533, 1 Core, 1.6GHz, 6MB L3, 696$
Itanium2 9015, FSB400, 2 Core w. VT/HT, 1.4GHz, 12MB L3, 749$
Itanium2 9020, FSB400/533, 2 Core w. VT/HT, 1.42GHz, 12MB L3, 910$
Itanium2 9030, FSB400/533, 2 Core w. VT/HT, 1.6GHz, 8MB L3, 1552$
Itanium2 9040, FSB400/533, 2 Core w. VT/HT, 1.6GHz, 18MB L3, 1980$
Itanium2 9050, FSB400/533, 2 Core w. VT/HT, 1.6GHz, 24MB L3, 1552$

So that means not only that Montecito is delayed for one year but also
doesn't reach the 2GHz that were promised, or a fast FSB (FSB667 which
already is a bottleneck for two processors, 533MHz or 400MHz is even
worse).

It has VT-i, Dual Core and 2 threads per core

aka HyperThreading

and it runs at 1.4GHz with 12M of cache and a 400MHz FSB and a price
of $749.

Which Xeon specs comes closest to it in "horsepower" assuming that
the graphics, amount of ram and the speed of the hd sub- systems are
equal?

First SPEC benchmarks show that the top of the line Itanium2 9050 with
Linux 1474 CINT2000 and 3017 CFP2000 does (every core). A 4-cpu system
with 8 cores does does 134 int_rate_base_2000 and 186 fp_rate_base_2000.

As a comparison:
A Dell PowerEdge 2950 with the only two of new XEON 5160 does 123
int_rate_base and 83 fp_rate_base2000. A HP Proliant DL585 with 4x
Opteron 880 does 136 int_rate_base_2000 and 131 fp_rate_base_2000. So at
least in the very important integer arena the not-top-of-the-line
Opteron 880 already beats the fastest new Itanium2. The IBM POWER5 in
the eServer p5 570 which is already on the market for some time now has
a much better fp_rate_base_2000 score of 241.

So again the fp performance of Itanium is good (but due to the strong
competition not that great as it has been before) but the integer
performance is just average.

Of course YMMV as it heavily depends on the applications one is running...

Ben, I was hoping for a comparison with a cheaper Xeon/Opteron that was
just as fast. Not the high dollar ones.

thanks....

* ***** charles:

Ben, I was hoping for a comparison with a cheaper Xeon/Opteron that was
just as fast. Not the high dollar ones.

That's of course difficult since the Itanium has already appeared and
there are not much benchmarks around yet (especially not of the slower
processors). And also the XEON has passed a change from Netburst to Core
architecture recently, and there also are not that much benchmarks around.

But the numbers confirm that the very expensive Itanium2 9050 has a hard
time to catch up with the current fastest Opteron (x85) which is going
to be replaced soon. Benchmarks show that the XEON Woodcrest 5160 is
already much faster than the Opteron, so it will basically kill Itanium
performance-wise. What the Itanium helps in these benchmarks is the huge
L3 cache, but as soon as the cache isn't enough the slow FSB gets a real
bottleneck. Current x64 cpus already have a much better I/O path (three
fast Hypertransport channels on Opteron, independent FSB1066 busses per
processor on XEON woodcrest).

Benjamin