Is the Itanium Dead?
Today we have a few responses from readers regarding the editorial from last Friday where I reviewed the Intel white paper demonstrating benchmarks using the E7 Series chip.
David:
While all you said was pretty true about the closed Itanium marketplace. I would have to say it is a sad day that I knew was coming. It is sad because I had the pleasure of working on the HP Integrity platform for several years, and all I can say is that the server really cooked when it came to performance! With NUMA support and parallel memory pipelines, processing was really impressive. Though I think it is only dead in the Windows marketplace. In the Unix, world many folks are using these processors for non MS SQL database servers, and I don’t think that will change.
But a lot of good came out of the Itanium that was moved to the E7 platform. The parallel memory pipelines and I think that NUMA has also migrated. From a performance standpoint, I have seen the HP DL580 with Quad 8-Core processors do some amazing things, but it doesn’t come close to a well balanced Itanium. My wife’s shop dropped the Itanium footprint and replaced 1 Quad Itanium server hosting 8 major databases to 10 HP DL580 with Quad 8 core boxes to carry the same processing weight. So from this it seems 4 Itaniums are equal to 80 Xenon X64 cores.
If it was up to me, I would be content to stay at SQL 2005 and Itanium because of the performance I have seen, but I do not get to make those calls.
Bill:
This is completely off topic, but in today’s newsletter you referenced "Solid State Disk". Should responsible journalists perpetuate this oxymoron? After all, there is no disk in solid state components. On one hand, accurate terminology means less explaining to the uninitiated. On the other, I know accuracy can be taken to an extreme. (It makes me a little nuts when Johnny Miller talks about a golfer using his "fairway
metal".)
But I could live with "solid state storage".
Matt:
The point of the PDF is not itanium, which isn’t even really RISC, it’s directed at the oracle/sparc combo, which is RISC and proprietary. Intel is demonstrating that you can run big workloads on SQL server and commodity compute instead of sparc hardware. Nothing to do with itanium at all.
Editor:
I associated the whilte paper with the Itanium chip simply due to the fact that it is the most high performance chip with Microsoft software working there. I agree that Oracle/Sparc are also directo competitors. However, now Intel has an expensive, high performance product line for which there is no software demand. You would find just about as much demand for the chip as you would for a Next computer.
In short, since there is no longer ongoing demand volume for the Itanium, Intel has two problems…
1) How to get out of the Itanium market
2) How to get comparable benchmarks to higher end systems with their remaining processor line
I think you will see hints of the answer with Microsoft turning so much of it’s efforts into distributed computing where high end systems are built from smaller commodity products. Their entrance into the Hadoop space and other sharding technologies are hints of this strategy.
Thanks for the responses. Tomorrow we move on to new topics.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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