by Anton Shilov
08/23/2004 | 02:53 AM
Intel’s move to decrease IA64 pricing is pretty noteworthy, as the world’s largest maker of microprocessors has so far preferred to withdraw its Itanium 2 products from the price list in favour of more advanced SKUs selling at the same price, rather than to reduce pricing on existing offerings. With introduction of the new Itanium 2 processors known as Madison 9M and Fanwood later during the year the lineup of IA64 architecture-based chips will be much broader than earlier.
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The Itanium 2 Monday’s price drop was pretty aggressive – the processors lowered their price by 12% - 32%, which is a very tangible dive even for desktop chips.
Itanium 2 wafer, picture by Intel Corp.
Intel today supplies 7 flavours of the Itanium 2 processors, up from 2 versions of the Itanium chips back in mid-2001. In addition to the number of Itanium 2 iterations offered to the market, Intel has also broadened the price-range of its IA64 chips: the Itanium 2 now cost from $503 to $4227 in business quantities allowing both affordable workstations as well as high-end servers.
While Intel is desperately trying to lower the costs of Itanium 2-based computers, such server and workstation systems are still more expensive compared to those based on the Intel Xeon processors since mainboards and other components for Itanium 2 cost a lot more compared to infrastructure for Xeon chips.
Currently the price gap between approximately similarly configured 4-way servers based on Xeon MP 3.00GHz/4MB processors and 1.50GHz/6MB Itanium 2 chips from HP is about 100% with the Xeon MP-based machine quoted at about $16 000, while the Itanium 2 powered system is priced at approximately $31 000.
Intel Itanium 2-based server from Bull, picture by X-bit labs
However, the main problem for the Itanium 2 popularity is not the cost, but compatibility with broad range of x86 applications. Since the Itanium-series uses completely different IA64 EPIC architecture, incompatible with the IA32, performance of the Itanium 2-based computers in conventional applications is tangibly below that on Pentium 4 or Xeon-based machines. As a consequence, customers who choose Itanium 2 should invest heavily into new software and practically wave goodbye to legacy applications.
Nowadays server and workstation platforms based on Intel Itanium 2 and Intel Xeon-series processors use different sockets, mainboards and chipsets. While some components may be used on both platforms, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet controllers, in generally platforms are not compatible or interchangeable.
Intel Itanium 2 chip, picture by PC Watch, Japan
Intel Xeon MP processors are plugged into mPGA603 ZIF sockets, Intel Itanium 2 are plugged into mPGA700 ZIF sockets.
Intel Itanium 2 chip, picture by PC Watch, Japan
Since Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon MP processors are extremely popular on the market, provided that Xeon and Itanium infrastructures are compatible, the Itanium 2 offspring will definitely benefit from this. Transition to IA64 for customers will no longer be associated with substantial investment in hardware, as the Itanium 2 and Xeon chips cost approximately the same amount of money even now, while the cost of Intel Xeon infrastructure has already proved to be cost-efficient, but will be limited to certain investments in software.
Nevertheless, Intel will still have to explain potential customers the need to spend rather lot of additional funds on IA64 software, as Intel’s Itanium processors only unleash their potential in environments specifically tailored for them and cannot offer a lot of power in conventional 32-bit apps. There is one more trick here: both Xeon DP has 64-bit capability now, while the Xeon MP will acquire it in less than a year time. Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker in this case will have to insist on the micro-architecture and raw performance of the Itanium rather than on its 64-bit capability.
While the Itanium 2 central processing units are usually treated as Intel’s top-of-the range offerings, it looks like all the microprocessors are driving the same direction in terms of general ways of improving performance. This means that unless there are breakthroughs in design of the future chips, performance difference or parity of processors based on different micro-architectures is unlikely to change in future.
According to AMD’s Fred Weber, the paramount forces to be deployed by the next-generation chips, such as AMD K9, AMD K10 and, most probably, into future microprocessors by other makers, are the following:
There is nothing really new in those patterns and some of them are either already available, or are just around the corner.
As reported, Intel will shortly unveil its
Intel’s Xeon processors also not going to decelerate the rate of development: next year the Xeon MP chips will get 8MB of L3 cache, then, both Xeon and Xeon MP will acquire dual-core technology. Xeon chips already feature Hyper-Threading technology along with power-management capabilities, additionally, they are expected to get security and virtualization techniques in 24-36 months, which will put them on the same level with the Itanium 2 in terms of performance and feature-set.
Advanced Micro Devices, International Business Machine and Sun Microsystems are also developing multi-core architectures with large caches, rapid data busses and security capabilities. In fact, IBM and AMD already feature substantial part of the above mentioned list with the latest Opteron and Power chips that are extremely tough competitors for both Xeon and Itanium 2 in terms of performance and cost.
So, after all the infrastructure issues are solved out, the Itanium- and Xeon-based platforms cost the same amount of money and are fully compatible on the hardware level, the main thing Intel will have to do is to convince end-users to choose the IA64, a processor architecture that performs slowly in widely available applications these days and that is not the only 64-bit tech around.
Current roadmaps of Intel and AMD show that both are pretty confident in further evolution of x86 architecture, therefore, it is unlikely that the development of x86 chips will be scrapped in 5-6 years time. However, with extreme clock-speeds of Intel Xeon and Pentium 4 chips at some point further evolution and performance may be limited by fabrication technology processes. Since the Itanium 2 chips can perform more operations per clock than the Xeon or Pentium 4 chips, at some point it may be more cost-effective to produce IA64 rather than IA32 CPUs. Furthermore, someday there will be applications that demand extreme processing power only the Itanium 2, or competing chips from other makers, will be able to deliver cost-efficiently.
“Intel’s strategy is to align the prices of individual products to meet the needs of each market segment. In addition, this move is the next step toward achieving Intel’s goal of delivering Itanium 2-based systems with up to twice the performance as Intel Xeon processor-based systems for the same system cost in 2007,” said Radoslaw Ceplin, an Intel’s spokesperson.
With server and workstation customers beginning to transit to the IA64 in 2007 timeframe Intel may begin the desktop onslaught of the Itanium architecture late this decade. Fortunately for the company Microsoft promised to add support of the Itanium into the upcoming operating system code-named Longhorn and has already implemented Execution Layer 32, a yet another way to improve performance of 32-bit when running on computers based on Intel Itanium 2 processors, into Windows XP 64-bit Edition and Windows Server 2003 SP1. Adding Itanium support into the most-popular operating systems means that the world’s main driving force of technologies – Microsoft Corp. – is very serious about Intel’s EPIC micro-architecture.
NEC servers powered by Intel Itanium 2, picture by NEC
The main thing desktop computers require is a broad range of applications that is used for daily needs, but software developers want either a broad installation base, or a clear message that there will be broad installation base and the market for their applications, before they proceed to develop programs that take advantage of any processing architecture. With a top-to-bottom lineup of Itanium 2 chips Intel is sending is such message to software developers.