Intel reveals new 64-bit server chip

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The missing link: At last Intel saw the light and introduced the missing link in their offerings. They made the same mistake as DEC: a radical switch to the Alpha RISC chip from its heavy VAX CISC processors.

Intel's shortcommings in the IA32 to IA64 switch were the following:

1 - it took them TOO long to provide a decently performing implemenation of their highly advertised IA64. Itanium 2 became a contender only in the last 2 years. Prices are still too high.

2 - they didn't provide a smooth upgrade path. All x86 apps would need to be recompiled in order to take advantage of the radically different features (EPIC) of the Itanium. Raw x86 code runs very slow on Itanium, compared to p4 and xeon.

3 - their compilers are still not so mature to allow code to fully utilize the Itaniums.

4 - it turns out that the Itanium 2 is good for compute intensive mono-threaded code. That is a good match for supercomputing types of apps usually running in batch mode. A server however, needs to handle 1000s of interrupts and context switches / sec. Itanium loses all the nice EPIC/pipelining benefits when confronted with server types of multi-tasking/multi-threaded workloads.

5 - Although the current Itanium 2 is good for multiprocessor types of apps, Intel never came up with a decent high-speed interconnect, nor it designed/proposed any efficient cache coherence protocol for larger SMPs.

In the meantime, AMD took the evolutionary path and provided the 64-bit capability from desktops, to middle tier servers and higher end machines. They implemented an architecture that directly executes the IA32 but that was extended to the much needed now 64-bits. The performance / price ratio are much better than that of Itanium's and compilers were much easier to come about since the x86 ISA is a well known one.

There is no surprise that AMD made the right strategic move to provide the needed missing link in the evolution of the popular (but crappy ) x86 ISA to the 64-bit arena. There is no surprise either that heavy weights such as IBM, Dell, SUN and even HP -- who pretty much designed Itanium -- put some of their eggs in their AMD busket.

And there is no surprise that Intel realized after the fact that it should had provided the missing step and it is now playing catch up.

Isn't unbridled competion good? The pervasiveness of Intel forced the AMD and the RISC designers to do their best to improve their own designs which now in turn are forcing Intel to improve its own?

The same story with UNIX/Linux and ms windows.

People need decent alternatives to chose from. Forced monolithic single-vendor solutions are bad for everyone.

-m; Posted by: michael-t Posted on: 02/17/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use