Intel is finally shipping the 64-bit Itanium

[Bari Ari]

Mark Hahn wrote:

>>> 
>> chipset support to go along with them. For the time being Mips has the 
>> price performance edge since nobody has taken the ARM 10 to market yet 
>> and Intel yanked the FPU out of the XScale before they released it.
> 
> 
> well MIPS has never delivered competitive performance, and seems to 
> be entirely out of the mass-market, as is ARM.  do you know of someone
> who is trying to mass-produce MIPS or ARM-based boxes? 
> 
Other than our low cost nodes, I am not aware of any.

>> fine grained for a fraction of the cost, but X86 with OTS motherboards 
>> will also always be a kludge. X86 has 20 years of baggage for legacy 
>> support and also produce enormous amounts of heat as compared to RISC.
> 
> 
> a very traditional, conservative response.  alas, ia32 is the fastest
> processor available excepting Alpha.  and alas, Alpha is not exactly
> price-competive in the usual sense.
> 
> 
You're not factoring cost/performance/heat/footprint. Alpha also comes 
out highest as far as heat and cost with the P4 hot on its tail. They 
also require companion chips like x86s that eat up $$ and board space. 
The 700 MHz Alphas wouldn't be so bad if they were <$200, same with the 
PPC 750cxe.

For fixed point using OTS XScale you get around 1000 Mips/W for around 
$50. Mips CPUs are about double that cost and 4x heat with the FPU.

>> Low cost RISC clusters will outperform any x86 mass-market OTS clusters. 
> 
> 
> please give specific


> 
>> RISC offers lower cost, smaller footprint, far less heat along with 
>> higher fixed and floating point performance.
> 
> 
> I can't imagine why you say that, except reading too much PR.
> for instance, the two fastest processors you can buy (spec int/fp)
> are Alpha and P4.  both are roughly comparable in heat.  it's obviously
> not the case that RISC systems in general are delivering any better
> FP performance.
> 
> or are you talking about some other more specialized measure?

Sure the Alpha comes out on top if you just look at spec int/fp followed 
by P4. If you compare the systems cost vs GFLOPs/Watts/cu.in., X86 and 
Alpha come out as highest cost, and much higher heat.

Bari Ari