Talk:Itanium

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Contents

[edit] Archives


[edit] Speed benchmarks missing

How about adding some specmark specs so people can understand how powerful a processor is.

This should be done for all of the processors.

This link:
[Ideas SpecINT2006 Benchmarks]
Shows that for Single Small/Medium/Large+Scientific installations,
Opteron/Xeon is tops in the SpecINT2006 benchmark,
while Itanium 2 dominates the Entiprise server market, but:
IBMs benchmarks in TPS, show the Power6-Based p560 at the top of the 16 core benchmarks.
[IBMs "Benchmarks"]

As for Benchmarking all the processors,

Tomshardware had a great roundup of 65 processors at:
[65 processor marathon of benchmarking]
and of course, the wikipedia article on benchmarking is a bit dated,

but covers almost all of the relevant issues:

[Benchmark (Computing)]
But it neglets to mention 'The Chang Factor' where a chinese computer vendor slowed down the real time clock to increase benchmark performance.
There are design factors that impact performance:
[The Opteron onslaught on The Good Ship Itanic ]

"a quad-CPU Opteron 848 has 25.6 GB/s memory bandwidth, compared to just 6.4 GB/s in a quad-Itanium2"

Finally, just so your brain can go tilt: The IA64 Itanium processor uses speculative branch predition more than any other processor. Profiling the benchmark code, and improving the compiler can and will have very dramatic effects on the benchmarks, and will show up in application performance. IBM has multiple decades in doing this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Artoftransformation (talk • contribs) 19:11, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I recall a while back they ran Sun Solaris under emulation on a IA-64 box and it out performed any available system running it natively. I will have to look up the article but it would be worth adding to the CPUs history as it was a very impressive achievement. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.159.120.166 (talk) 13:34, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] from Talk:Itanium when this was at Talk:Itanium (original)

I arbitrarily created Itanium (original afer trying very hard to fix the mess left to us by Intel. Intel first named the Itanium, and then named the Itanium 2. Some referenced to "Itanium" refer to the original, some to the product line, some to the newest Itanium 2, and some to the architecture. Upon sober reflection, I decided that this disambiguation article is the least bad way to fix the problem.

Recall that last year we tried to normalize this by moving most of the generic stuff to "IA-64." This did not solve the problem.

I moved the old "Itanium"artcle to "Itanium (original)" This preserved all of the old comments, etc.

If there is a better way to do this, please discuss it here. -Arch dude 06:14, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

I would suggest doing what happened with AMD64/EM64T/x86-64/x64 : much agonizing and carping, not everyone happy, but eventually all melded into one page.
After a cursory look at the three pages IA-64, Itanium and Itanium 2, I don't see enough original content to justify three separate pages. I would suggest merging all three into one. Sections could be: history, generic architecture, Itanium specific stuff, Itanium 2 specific stuff, market analysis, competitive. Or not, but that would seem to fit in the space of a normal article without too much problem.
As part of the process, I highly recommend getting into a heated debate on the article's primary name; always good for killing time over lunch. Worked for the x86-64 page. (It'd make sense to me to call it "IA-64", but I'd hate to spoil the fun by suggesting it this early in the game...)--NapoliRoma 21:05, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
But x86-64 is an architecture. There are also separate articles for each processor (Pentium, xeon, etc). And of course we all know (because HP, Intel, ISA, and IDC have told us many times) that there will be many more great implementations of the architecture as Itanium sweeps all other processors into the dustbin of history. But seriously: I would prefer to make "IA-64" a pure architecture article, convert Itanium 2 into "Itanium processors", and merge the current Itanium article into it and convert it into a pure technical implementation article, and then use the "Itanium" article for all the non-technical stuff: hype, history, market share, competitive analysis, etc. So we have three article but two of them are completely non-controversial and purely fact-based. After moving the bloat out of the "Itanium processors" article, we can also merge the Montecito article into it.-Arch dude 23:51, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
The cool thing about Wikipedia is that it's dynamic. If at some point, our Itanium overlords pause from their whipping ("we just like whipping!") to allow we, their fleshy minions, to write of the glorious 200 year history of IA-64 and how it came to dominate the human race, we could perhaps create an entire IApedia to hold it.
Today, all the Itanium content can (IMHO) fit in one page. If it starts to overflow, then consider splitting it off. Today, having separate articles appears to cause confusion, as no one understands the divisions. I don't think it's necessary to architect for tomorrow's potential IApalooza until there's a content glut to justify it.--NapoliRoma 01:38, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
OK,go for it. Create the mega-merged article and we can discuss it. I must admit that my strongest reason to separate into three articles was to try to isolate the technical from the controversial, but I will support you if you do the merge. Don't forget to merge Montecito. I'm not clear on how I can help, but if you want to split the work up, I will try to help. We probably need an administrator to unscrew the names after our community reviews your merged article. -Arch dude 02:22, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article misses some important historical perspective

I think this article is missing some important historical perspective on the Itanium. It is important to remember that Itanium and IA-64 were not conceived of as Intel's effort to split beyond desktop and server lines. Itanium was supposed to be leading the way as a next generation architecture which would gradually replace x86 altogether (backward compatibility was there only to allow an interim bridge). At that time Intel (with Microsoft) really did control the market. And they truly believed that they could convince the entire market to follow their migration path simply because they said so. They believed their new architecture would both improve performance and set back puny AMD's efforts to catch up. They also believed that developing a brand new architecture would be only slightly more challenging than developing a next generation x86 architecture (i.e. at the time they never dreamed that Itanium would fall so radically behind schedule). Their errors on all of these assumptions gave AMD a huge window of opportunity and forced Intel to make some rapid roadmap changes (which they actually did pretty well to their credit). Among other things they quickly stopped talking about Itanium as a lead vehicle for their overall roadmap. The whole episode, though, was a very good example of how success can go to a company's head and cause it to stumble.

I can't find an authoritative source on this (much of this is based on my own experience in the business and seeing earlier marketing efforts). Anybody know of such a source? --Mcorazao 22:14, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

There was nothing "rapid" about Itanium. The repositioning you speak of was too little, too late. This nightmare started in 1989 at HP, and Intel became involved in 1994 with a goal to release product in 1996 or 1997. Crippled product was finally released in 2001, with real product (Itanium 2) in 2002. By about 1997, the original premise of IA-64 (i.e., EPIC) had been overtaken by events. In 1989, EPIC looked to be the only way to break the one-instruction-per-clock barrier. However, super-scalar, pipelining, and related techniques turned out to be reasonably easy, and EPIC turned out to be hard. Intel (probably because of contractual commitments to HP) refused to acknowledge this until 2003 when Opteron and the market rubbed their noses in it. Even then, Intel's marketeers and upper management STILL tried to treat x86 as a second-rate technology suitable only for toy systems: the very words they used to describe x86-64 (e.g., IA-32 with 64-bit extensions") show this. It was not until the Core 2 Xeons in 2006 that Intel finally caught back up with AMD, and Intel even now will not acknowledge that Core 2 is a better choice than Itanium for big enterprise-class machines. I think we need to restructure the entire article set to accurately and objectively address this. See prior discussion. -Arch dude 23:32, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Request for comment: consolidated article

I have attempted to write a consolidated article, capturing all the important stuff from Itanium, Itanium 2, and IA-64, with the intent of replacing the three with one article named Itanium.

The proposed article is in my workspace. Please review and comment. (Comments on the proposed article's talk page, please.)

In addition to simplification and consolidation, I have attempted to add citations wherever I could, and I have removed some material that I could not find citations for. The article is basically a complete rewrite, but almost everything in it is from the original articles, with two major exceptions:

  • The material on the architecture is considerably more detailed and focused on architecture.
  • I added a timeline, moved many statements to the timeline, and added material to it.

We are still missing a lot of history from the timeline,(mostly 1994-1997) and we are missing a paragraph in the "History" section about the period from 2002 to present. However, this is material that is not present in the current articles either.

Thanks.-Arch dude 23:06, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

UPDATE: Colleagues, the WP:MERGE guideline is that a proposed merge can be completed after a two-week discussion period if consensus is reached, or after a four-week period if no comments are received. So far, there are no comments. I intend to perform the merger on or about 16 april if there are still no comments by then , but I would really prefer to have someone review the proposed new article. -Arch dude 18:26, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

I am not a strong supporter of merging these three articles into one. I think that there is enough information to have separated articles and architecture is different thing than a processor. However, your article is quite good (for example, table for released processors looks much better than different sections in Itanium 2 article now) but I dislike a timeline. It feels like a collection of facts which unnecessary expands the article. All these facts can be (if not already) mentioned in appropriate sections of the article. However, if the merge is necessary I think we will need articles called Itanium (processor), Itanium 2 which can be smaller articles just about that processors and some facts about them without architecture details (in similar style like POWER and POWER5). Still when somebody will try to find information about IA-64 (architecture), it can be confused when it will be redirected to Itanium (series of microprocessors) so I would prefer at least to articles Itanium and IA-64. --Vezhlys 18:28, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
The most important stuff in the timeline is reflected in the chart, which is a later addition. I will attempt to consolidate the timeline facts into the history section, But the protracted development cycle is the central fact of Itanium, and we need to convey that. -Arch dude 19:13, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Starting merge now, please stand by--DONE! -Arch dude

Sorry Arch dude but I do not think I can agree with your self. You could not really call the original Itanium as crippled as sunning native applications it was very impressive for its time. The real problem lay in compatibility. HP and Intel gave the original Itanium a very basic and slow hardware computability with X86. I’m this aspect they shot them self in the feet. Its quite simple really, The IA-64 was a high end item and people using them wanted high end performance. So no one is going to get a Itanium system to run X86. Yet there was very limited native IA-64 code apart from true high end applications where code is generally developed for it like in the supercomputers already talked about in the wiki. A very similar situation accrued with the old Digital Alpha architecture. Most people are not bothered about how technically good a architecture is how greater the future potential is from crossing to a modern architecture. Most people will only see the small picture and if something runs the programs they have faster they want it. So no matter how inherently poor X86 is its what we have and what we have used for many years now. In so X86 has the most money invested in it because more people are after X86. But pleased don’t be fooled in to thinking X86 is anything special as its a long way from it. As for your Intel VS AMD remarks I think its best not to start that as it can not be won. Yes AMD can make code CPUs that can be used well in some situations. But on the time scale you are talking I was using Intel derived systems using 64 separate CPUs controlled under a single OS. At the time that was not possible from AMD. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.159.120.166 (talk) 14:03, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Help with futures?

This replacement article removed all of the un verifiable hype in our existing articles. I cannot find anything positive to say that is not speculative.

However, there is still hope for Itanium. In particular:

  • Montecito has fairly good SPEC numbers by comparison to Xeon and Opteron, even though Montecito is still on a 90nm process while the other two are on more modern processes. This shows that IA-64 really is a superior architecture.
  • Tukwila will be able to use commodity chipsets, thus permitting ISVs to build Itanium systems without investing huge amounts of money to develop a chipset.
  • The original theoretical advantages of EPIC are finally realizable: the inherent codespace inefficiencies are much less relevant (cache is proportionately cheap) and the simplicity of EPIC permits a much smaller processor core to do more work. With multi-core dies, this means you can have more Itanium cores in the same space.

So, the question is: how can we add this information to the article without violating WP:OR? -Arch dude 12:31, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Unisys MCP and OS2200?

Are these environments supported on Itanium? Unisys systems have a mix of processors, and MCP and OS2200 are supported on the Xeons, for sure. Are they also supported on the Itaniums? if so, are they supported natively, or by instruction simulation? -Arch dude 12:31, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] On Gelato

The reference to Gelato is slightly incorrect. Gelato (see http://www.gelato.org ) is more than a developer community ... in fact most of its members are supercomputer sites, although it does have some developers (See the gelato membership page on http://www.gelato.org/participants/members.php for a breakdown).

Gelato is essentially an IA-64 user group, but certain members are sponsored to do particular projects ... for example UNSW to do superpage work, or the University of Waterloo to develop microC++. in addition, as compiler technology is so important to IA-64, they've been sponsoring work on gcc (see http://gcc.gelato.org/)

Note: I'm Peter Chubb, from Gelato@UNSW. I didn't want to add my biases into the main article. 65.91.54.2 04:55, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi, Peter. I wrote that sentence based on cursory examination of the Gelato web page. It's possibly accurate, but clearly incomplete. May I reccomend that you please correct it, but in the context of this article? Then, please create a Gelato Federation article. and we can link to it. State you bias on the talk page of the new article and request a POV review. I for one will certainly try to help. Could you also comment on this new version of the Itanium article set? Thanks. -Arch dude 12:00, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
update - since you do not have a Wikipedia login, I have created a stub for your article. If you do not have time to fill it out, I'll add some general stuff from the web site tonight. -Arch dude 14:25, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] spin: most vendors? increasing deployments?

I'm going to pull two spin-laden not-overly-factual statements.

Article says: By 1997, most enterprise systems manufacturers (with the exception of Sun) were designing systems based on the Intels's projected IA-64 processor

Besides the two grammar errors, DEC definitely wasn't, IBM was still quite devoted to the POWER2, and SGI was still mostly bound to MIPS, this would mean that only one of the top five enterprise vendors was taking the platform seriously, that being the one that invented it in the first place. Yes, IBM and SGI eventually shipped Itanium machines, but it's unclear that they were serious about it in 1997.

Article says: Deployments have increased steadily since its introduction.

What the heck does this mean? That they still sell some of them? That initially deployed units are now being re-deployed to trash heaps? -- Akb4 04:50, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

The 1997 statement was unsupported, so you were correct to remove it. However, I think is was broadly accurate. I will do some research. IBM and SGI both released Itanium systems in 2001 that included their own custom chipsets: A chipset is a long lead-time design. DEC was almost gone. The "Deployments" verbiage was my attempt to balance the negative tone of tone of the article. I initially used "sales" instead of "deployments," but many of the initial systems appear to have been given away. Sales increased year to year from 2003 through 2006, to about $2.4Bn. -Arch dude 09:28, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Change name to "Itanium Processor Family"?

I was thinking that calling this article "Itanium" makes it seem like it just talks about the original Itanium, and not the ISA and Itanium 2. I was thinking that maybe it would be better to call it "Itanium Processor Family"? What do you think? Imperator3733 20:16, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

I considered that. Take a look at NapaliRoma's comment in the top comment block above. He stated back in February that if we were to do a merged article, we should first engage in a heated debate about the correct name. I then created the new merged article and asked for comments for a four-week period before finally replacing the article. I guess I should have waited for the heated debate on the name first: now we must do it in the wrong order. :-) OK here is my reasoning: the word "Itanium," when used in the press, can refer to any member of the family, or to the architecture, or to some related subject. Thus, a random non-specialist reader of a general-purpose encyclopedia is likely to type in "Itanium" What should this "intelligent 12-year-old" see? the lead paragraph is intended for just such a person, and that paragraph tries to very concisely give all of the meanings (brand, processor name, and architecture name) of the word, while also putting them in context. If you wish to move this to "Itanium processor Family," then what will the lead paragraph be, and what will the lead paragraph of the "Itanium" article be? May I reccomend that you create drafts of the two new lead paragraphs? I think that we could then discuss them here, and perhaps improve them collaboratively as part of any name change. Or suggest any other method to collaborate on this. Note that this is my third attempt to tidy this set of articles up. Any comments on the quality and suggestions for improvement would be greatly appreciated, (or, just edit it if you prefer.) -Arch dude 21:37, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
Hey Arch dude -- sorry it's taken me so long to say so, but great job on cleaning/merging the article! (and apologies that I had no time to contribute or comment as you did so, but I did add a few items today.)
Not so surprisingly, I would agree that there's no particular benefit to renaming the article at this point. But if anyone feels all that strongly about it, they could certainly add a "Itanium Processor Family" redirect page.--NapoliRoma 23:11, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dedicated Windows Longhorn Itanium Edition

I was on the Longhorn Beta website and it would appear the Microsoft has developed an Itanium Based version of its Server. "Windows Server "Longhorn" for Itanium-based Systems This edition is designed for use with Intel Itanium 64-bit processors to provide web and applications server functionality on that platform. Other server roles and features may not be available." Thought this might be of interest to you all. 205.200.147.100 15:24, 3 May 2007 (UTC)Jon

[edit] Failed Passed "good article" nomination

This article failed good article nomination. This is how the article, as of May 14, 2007, compares against the six good article criteria:

1. Well written?: Yes
2. Factually accurate?: Yes
3. Broad in coverage?: Yes
4. Neutral point of view?: Yes
5. Article stability? Yes
6. Images?: Several images do not contain a fair use rationale, so this article can't be passed.

When these issues are addressed, the article can be resubmitted for consideration. If you feel that this review is in error, feel free to take it to a GA review. Thank you for your work so far. — ~ G1ggy! Reply | Powderfinger! 00:02, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

after addressing the problems with hte images, I have re-nominated the article for GA status. The problems were significant the the reviewer was quite right to raise them. I added the prpper "fair use rationales" on the two logo image pages, and I removed the improper justification on hte picture of the Itanium 2, tagged it as a copyvio on its image page, and removed it from this article. If Anyone has a digital camera and access to an Itanium 2, PLEASE take a picture of it and upload it to Wikicommons: ask me for help if you need it. Thanks. -Arch dude 23:31, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
OK, it has passed GA, after passing the images criteria. Congratulations! ~ G1ggy! Reply | Powderfinger! 23:45, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Yea, zoooooooooooom! Right through GA. Congradulations! This article clearly is the result of hard work. -- Jreferee (Talk) 23:18, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bus speeds correct?

In the processors table the mckinley has a 200MHz Bus and Montecito 533MHz - this imples a jump of more than 2 in bandwidth between the two which is very misleading. I suspect the frequencies listed aren't comparable or plain wrong. The original mckinly had 128 bits * 400MHz = 6.4GB/s of system bandwidth.

I'm fairly sure these numbers are correct. I just did a google for itanium montecito 533 and another google for itanium mckinley 200 and did a spot-check of the hits. The numbers are supported by the articles. Note that Montecito is newer than McKinley by four years and two process generations. Also note that much of the criticism of the early Itaniums centered on the inadequate memory bus speed. Furthermore, a Montecito needs a faster bus because it has two cores. I did not add a reference for each reference in the table, as it would add too much clutter. I created the table from information that was in the earlier versions of the Itanium and Itanium 2 article when I did the merge. If you find references that show that the numbers are wrong, by all means fix the article. -Arch dude 01:04, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
As a cross-check, based on the List of Intel Xeon microprocessors, the Xeon in June 2002 had a FSB speed of 400MT/s, and the Xeon in June 2006 had a FSB speed of 1066 MT/s, so the two processors are on similar technology curves. (Note: nomenclature for FSB speeds is not well standardized.) -Arch dude 13:33, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
The original Itanium 2 (McKinley) used a 400MHz bus (200x2, or 100x4). Montecito uses a 533MHz bus (266x2 or 133x4). Imperator3733 16:12, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
So in that case as the 533Mhz stands for 17GB/s, does the 400Mhz of the original Itanium 2 (McKinley) than stand for 12,8Gb/s? Massimo2007 12:18, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't think so. I believe that the Itanium bus is 128-bit (or 16 byte). 16 bytes * 400 MHz = 6.40 GB/s and 16 bytes * 533 MHz = 8.53 GB/s. I'm not sure, but I think that those are the correct BWs. Imperator3733 16:12, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

If you check the Montecito (processor) on it, it will tell you if I´m correct that there's a dual 533mhz FSB (2x128bit @17GB/s) available per node (4dies/8cores) or `system level`. This actualy means that every die or cpu has access to 4,26GB/s on a `full die` node. To me that´s very hard to belief and therefore would be nice to have some confirmation on that as well.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Massimo2007 (talk • contribs) 08:41, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Itanium logo

Itanium2 has been renamed into Itanium and the logo has been updated. The new logo is http://www.intel.com/sites/sitewide/pix/badges/itanium/itp_62.gif Old logos should be replaced with new logos according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LOGO —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.174.127.189 (talk) 05:49, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

But in this case we really need to update the article to account for all of the events of the last two weeks. We should not just relpalce the lead Logo, we should move the old logo down to the correct spot in the History, change the name on the lead infobox, anc change all references to the oritinal (2001) from "Itanium' To "original Itanium." We also need to convert from "Montecito" beingthe current Itanium to "Montvale" being the current Itanium. I will do this on hteweekend if obidy does it first. -Arch dude 14:58, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
Made preliminary changes including the new logo, But we still have work to do distinguish "original Itanium" from this new usage. -Arch dude 14:34, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hardware branchlong?

In the table of processors, there is a reference to McKinley having "hardware branchlong". This page provides no explanation of what that is, and Google was not very helpful other than to find another wiki that pulled an old version of the Itanium 2 WP page (which now redirects here) and indicates branchlong is an IA-64 instruction of some sort. So does anyone have any further information? — Aluvus t/c 02:09, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

When I did the merge and rewrite, I collapsed a long set of short paragraphs into this tabular format. Each of the short paragraphs had (some of) the information that ended up all but the last column. In a few cases there was some very brief additional information. I mindlessly put that additional information into the last column. "Hardware branchlong" was not available in Merced.I got the impression that the instruction was therefore synthesized, probably via a trap. The real instruction was added to the architecture starting with McKinley, and it exists in all subsequent Itaniums. I cannot recall where I saw this described, but I did check it at that time. If I can find the reference, I will put it into the "architectural changes" section. If you find it first, may I recommend that you put it there? -Arch dude 13:29, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
Just an update: some research for another project turned up more information about this instruction. It is used to allow branches to make large jumps (skipping a large number of instructions), rather than making multiple short jumps to accomplish the same result. The mnemonic is brl. It is described on page 69 of the Itanium 2 reference manual. I am not sure how much of this information is worth including in the article, but in any event this takes a lot of the mystery out of this instruction. — Aluvus t/c 02:33, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] MiB and KiB v.s. MB and KB

Note. For interested authors, debate and a vote is ongoing on Talk:MOSNUM regarding a proposal that would deprecate the use of computer terms like “kibibyte” (symbol “KiB”), “mebibyte” (symbol “MiB”), and kibibit (symbol “Kib”). It would no longer be permissible to use terminology like a “a SODIMM card with a capacity of two gibibytes (2 GiB) first became available…” and instead, the terminology currently used by manufacturers of computer equipment and general-circulation computer magazines (“two gigabytes, or 2 GB”) would be used. Voting on the proposal is ongoing here. Greg L (my talk) 21:20, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Timeline format

I reverted a substantial set of formatting edits made by an anon using 68.148.164.166. The edits were a good-faith attempt to improve the article, but I arrived at the original format after quite a lot of thought and experimentation, and I personally like the old way better. If there is a consensus that the new format is better, we can revert my revert. Please discuss here.

Basically, timelines are generally deprecated. I retained the timeline originally because I thought it was the best way to succinctly express the long and twisty history that is the true story of Itanium. However, the newer format caused a major visual expansion to the timeline, giving it undue weight. Worse, the new format, which uses additional levels of TOC headers, caused a huge expansion to the TOC, Which destroyed the continuity from the lead to the second section. The TOC expansion also gives a casual reader the impression that the TOC is the bulk of the article.

The best solution would be a timeline using the magic timeline template, but that template is very hard to use. -Arch dude (talk) 17:51, 26 April 2008 (UTC)