Archived from groups: alt.solaris.x86,comp.arch,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips (
More info?)
On Sun, 18 Apr 2004 10:35:33 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
<news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
>Not offering any opinions myself, just relaying an article:
>
>http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6757
I'm not really makes any sense at all, he's totally ignoring the
customers that Sun sells to!
Just how, exactly, would the Itanium fit into any of Sun's line-up and
how is it even remotely better than what they've got planned? Sun
sells to two main markets, their "Network Facing" servers, ie database
servers, web servers and the like, and their "Data Facing"
workstations. Which of these would the Itanium fit into?
One thing to remember before we begin: Going forward over the next
5-10 years, probably the most important aspect of processor design is
going to be performance/watt. Previously power consumption was low
enough that it could generally be ignored for servers, that is no
longer the case.
First off, for their servers they are looking for throughput. High
single threaded performance is pretty pointless as compared to high
multithreaded performance. Sun is very well positioned in this market
because of their software, Solaris is probably the best operating
system on the planet when it comes to scalability (with the possible
exception of AIX). However the hardware side of things helps Sun out
here as well. Good I/O is very important for performance in this
market while raw number crunching isn't such a big deal.
So, what solution does Sun have? A little chip called "Niagara". 8
cores, each capable of executing 4 threads simultaneously. It's
single threaded performance won't even be half that of the Itanium,
but for multithreaded performance it will SMOKE anything Intel has in
the pipeline before "Tanglewood" in 2007/08, and it will do so with
about half the power consumption (or less) and a smaller die.
As for the workstation market, here Sun is dead in the water, but
Itanium won't save them. x86 is going to steamroll over all other
workstation architectures. It's already BY FAR the dominant
workstation platform, and the only reason why x86 hasn't totally taken
over the market is that it wasn't 64-bit. That, of course, has
changed with the Opteron (and soon with the Xeon as well). The
Itanium had it's chance to make an impact on the workstation world
over the past few years, and it failed miserably. Now that 64-bit x86
is a reality, NOBODY is interested in much else. Even if an Itanium
is a little faster, who is going to spend $25,000 for an Itanium
workstation when they can get 95% of the performance from an Opteron
or Xeon system costing only $5000? It's even worse for the large
chunk of workstation tasks that focus on integer performance where the
Opteron is easily faster than the Itanium.
Sun does still have a market for SPARC workstations to support legacy
applications, but the Itanium is obviously no help here either.
Really I'm not sure that there is much of a market for Itanium except
as a replacement for PA-RISC and Alpha, neither of which were hugely
successful chips (in terms of sales, both had some pretty decent
performance). Itanium is a pretty good chip for HPC work, but that's
not really a market Sun competes in anymore. I suppose by buying SGI
and selling their Altix systems, Sun could get back into this market.
However given that SGI is bleeding even more red ink than Sun is, I'm
not sure that would be a very good idea. Besides, IBM looks to be
STRONGLY pointing the way forward in HPC with their Blue Gene/L
systems. Those who are familiar with this technology will know that
it bares a resemblance to the Niagara chip mentioned above in that
Blue Gene/L consists of many simple cores on a single chip rather than
one complicated core.
Now, things aren't entirely too bleak for Itanium. The idea of
putting many cores on a single chip is, at least in theory, VERY well
suited to the VLIW design that the Itanium purports to follow. VLIW
chips should have a very simple and low powered core with a small die
that gets quite a bit of performance by offloading a lot of work to
software. The problem here is that somewhere along the way the
Itanium seems to have become just totally buggered, but it is neither
simple or low powered and the die is huge (admittedly it's mostly
cache). However if Intel can get these aspects in line and get back
to the original theory of VLIW chips, putting a whole bunch of
Itaniums cores on a single chip could have a LOT of potential. This
is exactly what Intel's "Tanglewood" chip is all about, though the
shipping date of that chip has been rather fuzzy.
Still, like I've hinted at above, it'll have to make it to market and
get the software support behind it before the window of opportunity is
gone. Sun's kind of in the same boat with Niagara, though at least
they have an existing market to sell to, so that gives them more time.
Intel (and customers) have to build their market for Itanium products,
which is MUCH more difficult.
I've mentioned a few things about this before, but I'll mentioned them
again:
1. I think Sun made the right choice in killing off the UltraSparc V.
It wasn't going to be enough to save their workstation market from x86
and it wasn't going to give them the "throughput computing" that
Niagara will. The only dumb thing Sun did here was that they waited
too long, they SHOULD have killed the UltraSparc V back in 2001 or
thereabouts.
2. There are only three ISAs that I see having a really positive
future going forwards: x86, PowerPC and ARM (only counting higher-end
stuff here, Motorola 68xx and PIC chips will still outsell everything
else on the planet by an order of magnitude or two), Itanium looks
like it will replace PA-RISC as HP's primary server chip as well as
replacing Alpha as the choice for raw number crunching HPC stuff, but
neither of those markets look super promising. Large *nix servers are
continuously being replaced by smaller/cheaper x86 systems running
Windows or Linux. HPC is moving more towards clusters of COTS stuff,
or alternatively to stuff like IBM's Blue Gene/L. SPARC has an
existing market to continue support, but again that's getting eaten up
by x86 in a fairly large way.
Anyway, not only do I not really think that Sun "has" to switch to
Itanium, I'm not even sure that it would achieve anything. Maybe when
"Tanglewood" gets here, but that's still a bit of an unknown.
-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca
2k980phj7us0v6idt3n1jb0his8g7vns3@4ax.com...
whether the increase is cost-effective at
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