Intel Releases Itanium 9500, Packing Up to 8 Cores

[Guest]

Intel released the 32 nm generation of its Itanium processor series, now known as the 9500-series.

Intel Releases Itanium 9500, Packing Up to 8 Cores : Read more

 

[devBunny]

Like me, you may be wondering.... why?

http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/06/ask-ars-why-itaniumask-ars-with-xeons-improvement-why-bother-with-itanium/

 

[Estix]

and supports up to 2 TB of low voltage DIMMs in a four-socket configuration

Jesus, 512GB DIMMs? Or am I misinterpretting that?

 

[JOSHSKORN]

Wish they'd hurry up with an 8 core consumer version.

 

[maximiza]

8 cores..cool, but at 170 watts, sorta hot

 

[SuperVeloce]

[citation][nom]Estix[/nom]Jesus, 512GB DIMMs? Or am I misinterpretting that?[/citation]
I think it means 4 cpu sockets (equals 4 memory controllers)... and many many dimms

 

[Estix]

[citation][nom]SuperVeloce[/nom]I think it means 4 cpu sockets (equals 4 memory controllers)... and many many dimms[/citation]

That makes more sense. (And here I had gotten my hopes up 😛 )

 

[joebob2000]

[citation][nom]Estix[/nom]That makes more sense. (And here I had gotten my hopes up )[/citation]

You can already buy 32GB on a single DIMM, it won't be long before we get to 512.

 

[joebob2000]

[citation][nom]devBunny[/nom]Like me, you may be wondering.... why?http://arstechnica.com/business/20 [...] h-itanium/[/citation]

"Now, this $4 billion number is a lot smaller than $30 billion, which is the size of Intel's Xeon business. But it's a lot larger than $1.6 billion, which was the revenue for all of AMD combined (CPUs, GPUs—the whole company) in the first quarter of 2011."

oops, a year is not a quarter. Ars fail. full stop.

 

[InvalidError]

[citation][nom]Estix[/nom]That makes more sense. (And here I had gotten my hopes up )[/citation]
And that "lot of DIMMs" would be buffered 32 chips quad-bank (think two dual-sided DIMMs smashed into one) DIMMs... four of them per channel, four channels per CPU, 64 DIMMs total.

Maxed out, such a monster must be an interesting thing to behold at least for the first few times around.

 

[nforce4max]

170w per chip, that is twice as much as what I have in my old Xeon rig 😱
At least they moved it to a common socket so maybe in the long run Itanium might gain market share.

 

[kinggremlin]

[citation][nom]SuperVeloce[/nom]I think it means 4 cpu sockets (equals 4 memory controllers)... and many many dimms[/citation]

They do. It would look something like this:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/5/27/intel-nehalem-ex-xeon-spells-the-voice-of-doom-for-itanium.aspx

This is a quad Nehalem system from back in 2009, not Itanium, but the Itanium setup would look similar with memory riser cards.

 

[Pinhedd]

[citation][nom]maximiza[/nom]8 cores..cool, but at 170 watts, sorta hot[/citation]

Not really that big of a deal. IBM's POWER7+ processors hit over 300 watts

 

[Pinhedd]

[citation][nom]JOSHSKORN[/nom]Wish they'd hurry up with an 8 core consumer version.[/citation]

There are not, and will never be, consumer versions of the Itanium processors. There are 8 core Sandybridge processors, but they are pricey. Itanium is Intel's answer to IBM's extremely reliable POWER based enterprise servers and mainframes. The only reliability features present in x86 processors is support for ECC memory, a very tiny subset of the features present in top POWER7+ processors and Itanium processors. Enterprise grade systems do allow for CPUs to be hot-swapped but there is no failure protection on x86 chips, all workloads on that CPU will fail. Top end POWER7+ chips such as those found in the IBM zEnterprise mainframes allow for workloads to fail over from one processor to another, not something that you need in a desktop.

 

[Pherule]

Is it only me who is wondering why they've gone with 32nm? Consumer CPU's have already been at 22nm for almost a whole year now.

Intel should either go 22nm with this, or wait a year and go straight to 14nm,

 

[army_ant7]

[citation][nom]joebob2000[/nom]You can already buy 32GB on a single DIMM, it won't be long before we get to 512.[/citation]When you say "you," you mean businesses (and not consumers) right? Just checking.

[citation][nom]Pherule[/nom]Is it only me who is wondering why they've gone with 32nm? Consumer CPU's have already been at 22nm for almost a whole year now.Intel should either go 22nm with this, or wait a year and go straight to 14nm,[/citation]Maybe they started with 32nm when they got started developing this. I'm not sure when they started development, but 32nm CPU's might've not even been out then.

 

[whooleo]

I think you guys forget that this is Itanic I mean Itanium..... Anyways Power 7+ is much better.

 

[Prescott_666]

Itanium has failed, it is a dead man walking, and I don't know why. It was supposed to be the solution to the x86 baggage, which includes features that go all the way back to the Intel 8008(maybe even the 4004), but it must have serious problems of it's own, or why did it fail?

Does anyone know why server users did not choose it? It wasn't because they were not available, although pretty soon they will not be. Too much buck for the bang? Bad architecture? Some other shortcoming?

 

[kinggremlin]

It failed because AMD released their x86-64 which was a 64bit extention of x86 and screwed everyone in the process. Since x86-64 was a relatively simple extention of x86 which allowed CPU's to run all x86 code natively as opposed to ia64 CPU's which had to emulate x86 (with a huge performance hit), the market chose the cheaper/easier route rather than wiping the slate clean and truly moving the industry forward.


If AMD hadn't

 

[kinggremlin]

released their 64bit band-aid we would likely be well on our away of freeing ourselves from the decades old baggage of x86 by now.

 

[army_ant7]

@kinggremlin
I'm not totally sure about this, but I remember reading somewhere that Itanium is designed in a way to handle server-type data workloads (maybe super-highly-threaded workloads or huge chunks of data, I don't really know), unlike x86. So even if mainstream software were made to work with Itanium, they wouldn't run as good as they do with x86. Is this false?

 

[tipoo]

Funny that while Itanium is considered a very niche market and it's value is often questioned, it alone pulls in more cash than ALL of AMD. Hows that for perspective, people can bash AMD for not being more competitive in single core performance but when you look at how much smaller they are, it's amazing that they even lasted this long against a behemoth like Intel.

 

[tipoo]

Anyone know how much IBMs Power7 series pulls in, by the way? Less than Itaniums 4 billion I imagine?

 

[whooleo]

Anyone know how much IBMs Power7 series pulls in, by the way? Less than Itaniums 4 billion I imagine?

IBM's POWER7 packs only 1.2 billion transistors on a 45nm process but it's more powerful then Itanium. Can't beat 4 way SMT with 8 cores!

 

[spacegamer]

army_ant7 is right, and HP specifically needs this chip for "server-type data workloads" running on its legendary NonStop and OpenVMS operating systems. People who use them aren't just hanging on to them for old times sake. They still are state of the art and best of breed at what they do.