Intel is finally shipping the 64-bit Itanium

[Bari Ari]

Mark Hahn wrote:

>> 
> I can't imagine Itanium being a mass-market item for years, if ever.
> and I pledge allegiance to the Orthodox Church of Beowulf, which
> holds that if it's not mass-market, it's not cluster-Kosher ;)
> 
The AMD Sledge/Hammer series will also be nice for clusters whenever 
they finally make it to market. Hopefully there will be some nice 
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.

It's great to see Beowulf clusters offering similar performance to 
traditional supercomputers for coarse grained applications and even some 
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.

Low cost RISC clusters will outperform any x86 mass-market OTS clusters. 
RISC offers lower cost, smaller footprint, far less heat along with 
higher fixed and floating point performance.

Bari Ari