[Beowulf] itanium vs. x86-64

[Toon Knapen]

> 
> SGI altix3000 series is basically 280ns (random 8 byte reads from big 
> buffer) shared memory until 4 sockets.

itanium needs 8 clock-cycles to fetch a double from L2 cache (floats are 
not stored in L1) and 110 clock-cycles from L3 IIRC, how is that with 
x86-64?


> f) itanium2 total focussed upon floating point, yet that is about the 
> least interesting thing for such hardware to do; there always have been 
> cheaper floating point solutions than itanium2. Let's forget about the 
> disaster called itanium-1. A wrong focus. Integer speed simply matters 
> for such expensive cpu's. This is why IBM could sell power6.

same goes for x86-64, no?