Art is making something out of nothing and selling it - Lewis Carroll
THE RECENT LAUNCH of Intel's Dunnington based six-core Xeon processors won't spell the end for the Itanium family.
Despite the significant performance gains of the new x86 based Xeon's, the company has confirmed that Itanium continues to be a viable choice for some customers primarily due to the 'Reliability – Availability – Serviceability' (RAS) features implemented in the VLIW based Itaniums.
"Itanium is still particularly attractive for those people running mission critical systems and require extremely high levels of reliability," explained Joachim Aertebjerg, Intel's Server Product Line director.
"For those in industries such as telecoms, where people have a more conservative attitude to things and need seven nines availability, this is still the best choice."
Although Itanium is lagging behind in the performance stakes a little these days, Intel reckons it's due to get a hefty bump with next year's launch of a new family based on Tukwila.
Whether Intel could successfully stick RAS features in its x86 is a matter of some debate, but certainly for the foreseeable future it looks like Dunnington isn't going sink the Itanic. µ
A translation of the intel spokes persons comment: "Well, we have pumped so much money into the Itanic processor and charge the adopters of it such a grossly huge amount of money in the past we have to justify keeping it with something. So we'll just say all the other stuff we make is unreliable except this one, and sorry its a bit slow and incompatible"
Itanium is by no means a RISC based processor. IA64 is 'EPIC' based which is more like VLIW.
So x86 isn't as reliable as Itanium? Is Intel admitting its Xeons aren't really that reliable compared to the chip they spent a billion bucks developing and had a hard time selling because Opteron came and spoiled the party? Don't think so.
Both Tukwila and Beckton will have 24M L3. Both Tukwila and Beckton will have SMT. Both Tukwila and Beckton will have 4x MC. Tukwila will have 4x QPI + 2x half-width QPI. Beckton will have 4x QPI. Tukwila will have a slightly better uncore. In general, Beckton will offer more or less the same RAS capabilities though. However, Beckton will pack twice the cores into slightly less die size than Tukwila, and it will do so in 130 W. Itanic not sinking? Yup, that's what they said about the Titanic too...
Nobody gets extremely high levels of reliability from the Itanium processor. The x86 is legacy, but there is absolutely nothing in the Itanium processor architecture that makes it more reliable than the x86 architecture. But there is one (1) operating system (!) that totally relies on the Itanium processor, and that is OpenVMS. And it is this operating system that is known for its reliability and security which makes the difference. OpenVMS depends on the Itanium because it only runs on 3 CPU architectures, namely VAX (dead since a long time), Alpha (officially murdered a few years ago exactly on my birthday, sigh) and - Itanium! No other operating system depends on the Itanium. BTW, Intel also uses OpenVMS. Now, why did hp fire so many experts who used to work for hp OpenVMS engineering? Why is hp not putting any effort into new OpenVMS developments (other than unix migration garbage)? Why is hp not exploiting the outstanding features of this operating system? Maybe because hp is just another PC shop.
Before commenting, people need to do research. Not all RAS feature sets are made equal. "Advanced RAS" may have the following features while certain garden varieties don't: -Internal logic soft error checking -Lockstep support -Bad data containment -Cache reliability Again, please do not pollute the comments section with manure. Thanks.
"... Again, please do not pollute the comments section with manure. Thanks." But we Likes IT (!)
itanium has a couple of features, other intel chips donot have. e.g, lockstepping, they are needed by e.g. fault tolerant systems like the nonstop (aka tandem, the boxes that are used to process creditcard transactions or building mercedes's ) that can use / must be able to rely on the chip's capability of self-detecting errors and correcting them..... ( they use 2 upto 4 cores to do that ) so, yes, if you run the os that knows this feature, they are more reliable. nothing useful for desktop use, though. rg