Apollo, Rob Landley of The Motley Fool is wrong about several things:
1) He thinks Itanium systems will be using Rambus. That's not true. Itanium on the 460GX chipset will use PC100 SDRAM, not Rambus.
2) He thinks memory bandwidth will be the real limiter of Itanium's performance. First, 460GX will have more than enough memory bandwidth for the Itanium bus. And second, he's praising Pentium III Xeon servers, even though that architecture boasts much less memory bandwidth than Itanium.
3) He thinks Itanium will have a poor price-to-performance ratio. This is more of an opinion than a fact, but I believe Intel will keep the same price/performance dynamics that made Xeon so great, and boost performance with IA-64 technology. In other words, price/performance should not be an issue.
4) He thinks Itanium's on-chip cache is at the same levels of Celeron. What he doesn't realize is that Itanium also features 2 to 4 MB of off-chip L3 cache running at full-speed.
5) He says, "AMD's chips still use a socket instead of Intel's more-expensive cartridge design." Perhaps he forgot that Athlon debuted in a Slot A cartridge form. Interestingly, Itanium comes in a cartridge form which is much more compact than Xeon's Slot 2 cartridge. (Itanium also fit into a socket instead of a slot, but that's not much of a big deal.)
Overall, the guy has way too many inaccuracies to be taken seriously.
Tenchusatsu |
