Intel is finally shipping the 64-bit Itanium
Bari Ari
bari at onelabs.com
Sun May 27 14:47:42 PDT 2001
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
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