Re: Compaq just vacated the Alpha - and signed on with the Intel ITanium for ALL OF COMPAQ's FUTURE
A year ago it was Alpha forever, a year from now it may be AMD X86-64 forever.
We're still waiting to see how a real shipping Itanium runs on real code instead of one-off, hand tweaked benchmark exe's with all the error checking stripped out.
Thanks to Reinhard for posting about some new Itanium SPEC CPU2000 results published by c't. The new results are the first independent CPU2000 figures released for Itanium which also include the full subtest scores. Also interesting is the inclusion of results for the chip running in x86 compatibility mode. The performance difference between the native IA-64 binary and the x86 binary is roughly one decimal place, with x86 SPECfp2000 Base coming in at 86 to the 694 of the native IA-64 binary. Native SPEC Base integer performance is 360, while the x86 version scores 113. Needless to say, if you're looking to run some x86 apps on your Itanium workstation, you might be better served by your 233 MHz Pentium II box.
It was also mentioned apparently that c't tried to compile SPEC on their own, but couldn't get the compiler to produce an error free binary. As a result, they used the binaries supplied by Intel. Since no full SPECint2000 results which include the subtest scores have been published by Intel yet, this is our first glimpse of how Itanium performs on each of the benchmarks in the SPECint2000 suite. As you know, Intel originally published a benchmark comparison against various Sun systems, including a SPEC comparison. However, Intel has since changed the score for the 800 MHz Itanium from 403 to 370
Intel bought some more time for Itanic, but quite a bit more bailing is required.
This chip was expected to be in production 2 years ago.
Intel paid out $3.8 billion more than they took in last quarter - they're going to have to start cutting their losers at some point. Tualatin looks OK - putting server versions into the roadmap was a good idea, but may have been the kiss of death for the Foster program. Maybe Intel can stretch PIII till Itanic is ready for the desktop, if Itanic is every ready for the desktop. Meanwhile, P4 is looking like it has about the same life expectancy as Alpha... |
