From Michael da Kota on Raging Bull...
His translation of the tweakers article.
Hiya people...been gone for some time from AMD threads but just saw the recent article and made some translation for JC's page, and as I was on it I decided to finish it off and post it here. Lost my SI account so if someone can link it to them guys, please!
Please forgive me the spelling mistakes, I typed this all 100% blind at my fastest typing , no checking for mistakes and stuff....and roughly translated from the dutch. Sentences might appear wierd, as I cannot read more than 1 or 2 sentences ahead and thus cannot always finnish things off properly. But its understandeable I hope!
Page 6 of Tweakers.net article (this is were it starts to get a little interesting)
( athena.tweakers.net )
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The itanium offcourse is the first ia-64 processor, partly designed to develop software and gain experience with designing chips wich make use of the new architecture. Furthermore Itanium is usefull for testing motherboards and chipsets. If you would say this bluntly, you can state that the Itanium is nothing more than a scrabble (as in, scrabble - drawing - full paiting ;) Intel themselves seem to think of it similarly, they expect to sell very few (says "10's of pieces" here..), because the usage of the processor , mainly due to high cost and lack of software, will be limited. The traject from IA-32 to IA-64 will be very long , and there is only little information available over it."
The first IA-64 processor wich wil be used for real is the McKinley, wich will be the followup of the Itanium in 2002. Mcinly will have a pipeline of 10 steps, three more than Itanium. With that information we can say that at the eind of this year a clockspeed of 1 GHz is feasable, wich is about twice the speed of Itanium. Mcinley, in conjunction with Foster (the server version of Pentium4), will use the i870 chipset with support for DDR SDRAm and RDRAM. In that timeframe Itanium systems will have enough software developed for it , but if cost will drop remains to be seen. The yields wont get much better because Intel is planning to intergrate the (external , for Itanium) 4mb L3 cache, nearly 300 miljion resistors, on the processor DIE .
To reduce cost intel will move over to the cheaper 0.13 micron manifacturing process, and end of 2002 the first IA-64 processor will be on that process. This chip is codenamed Madison and is the follow up of Mcinley. The smaller die-size isnt the only important development at that time, because Intel is planning to occupy some more marketshare in the mid-end servers and high end workstations by releasing a cheaper version of Madison. This processor, of wich we only know the codename "Deerfield" , by fast wont be as powerfull , but will have an interesting (read, low) pricetag.
The Competition :
As a small sidenote to this whole article a little text on x86-64, AMD's answer to IA-64.
Both architectures are 64 bit, but in contrast to Intel AMD did not go trough the trouble of making a complete new design. In stead of that they took their existing one and enhanced it with a number of 64 bit trics . The first x86-64 processor will be the sledgehammer, wich should be in quantity available early 2002. With the Clawhammer, the cheaper version of the Sledgehammer, AMD will be focussing on the joe-average consumer. The benefit of AMD's approuch is that this saves them a lot of money, and have full support of any current software. The downside to this is that the technology is still based on the quickly aging x86
When we heared that we were allowed to preview the Itanium, we were overjoyed offcourse, but quickly there were rising several important questions. We were one of the first , and had no clue how we should do it the best way. After intensive searching all over the world, strange japanese sites, intel developers forum, and mails to a number of big names like Paul DeMone, we concluded that there wasnt any IA-64 software for Windows to be found. Intels V-Tune 5.0 compiler with support for Itanium and Pentium 4 is only available to a select group of people, and Beta versions of Microsoft SQL server 64 werent exactly lying about either. Offcourse there are plenty of IA-64 Linux distributions available for download, but because the system was allready running windows Whistler , that would get a little to complicated.
The advice we got was that we should focuss on x86 performance, as - especially in the begin when IA-64 software is rare- that is almost as important as in IA-64 mode. The benchmarks wich we took with us offcourse will be familiar to you. On one side its nice, because you have a lot of reference material, on the other side its ashame we did not get a real picture of what the Itanium is ment for : IA-64
Unfortunatly we werent allowed to make pictures of the system of the owner, as the all-present serial numbers would make the owner easely identifiable , wich could bring him in trouble. I can tell you in one word that the system is really BULKY and HORRID. You need two strong men to lift the case up, and the average vacuum cleaner wont get above the noise the thing makes...and thats NO joke. All in all very impresse, but you want to see benchmarks offcourse.
Whistler wouldnt really cooperate, if that was a twirk of the operating itself or the exotic Itanium hardware is not know, but a lot of the standard benchmark suites wouldnt work.SiSoft Sandra 2001 refused to install, Sysmark 2000 and winbench99 same story. 3DMark 2000 and Quake3 also refused, as the videocard wasnt DirectX 7 compatbile. There we were, a shitload of software to usefully fill the limited amount of time we had. but than the system refuses cooperation right a way. :( . We couldnt even make a WCPUID screenshot, so that is why you have to do it with this :
athena.tweakers.net
Gladly there are more benchmarks than just the ones you see everywhere. For example there is Distributed.net client, better known as "Koe" (Cow) . That prooved to work fine, altough the processor offcourse wasnt recognized. After automatic selection of the fastest core we started a benchmark, still hopefull....a few seconds later our jaws were dropped to floor-level, because the Itanium didnt even get 96 kkeys/sec ...a score wich can even be bettered by a 486!!! The Rc5 cores of the client are offcourse heavely optimized for a real x86 processor, reason why a good score was more or less out of the question..but probably nobody expected it to be THIS bad .
As a second test we used Tom Kerrigans Simple Chess Program, a small program specially written to strain the branch predictors of a processor to the limit. The tool does this by simulating a chessgame. After recalculating a number of moves three times, the average speed of the processor in MIPS rolls out. EPIC hardware in theorie is capable of performing better than IA-32 in this kind of stuff, but x86 --< IA-64 converter soon prooved to do its work badly. Here the score of the Itanium was just as bad, even a Pentium 100 would surpass the 64 bit titan, not to mention the 20 times faster Pentium 4 .
athena.tweakers.net
Before we go over to Real-life benchmarks, we have one more synthetic , nameley Stream, a program to measure the memory bandwith during the different operations. Either its the motherboard or the processor itself, but suddenly the Itanium appeared to be a lot faster. Instead of performing around the level of a Pentium 75, it started reaching Pentium 200 speeds :)
athena.tweakers.net
Benchmarks : FLaskMPeg & Testcpu
The itanium isnt performing to well till now...but there is still hope, maybe it is capable of performing x86 floating point operations quickl. To test that we will use FlaskMPEG. Flask is a program to compress video images ...and, as you could have suspected, that is heavy floatingpoint work. As input we used a .vob file, ripped from the film "The Matrix" . Furthermore Tom's hardware was friendly enough to supply some comparison material. To keep things honest we used the same settings || For images look at page athena.tweakers.net ||
Needless to say , it is very clear that the Itanium lags behind enourmously. Only the last graph can be commented on, the SSE2 emulation on the Itanium makes things even worse. That is strange because with the Pentium 4 these 144 instructions deliver a good amount of extra performance. An explenation for this could be that the translator hardware has trouble wit hthe special instructions in IA-32, but that doesnt really make sense as the use of MMX _does_ make a significant positive differance in performance.
Furthermore the Itanium , besides of translating SSE2, has the ability to use native IA-64 SSE2, and thus translation shouldnt have been a problem. The last benchmark is the program TestCPU, a multipurpose test program wich tests most aspects of a CPU. || See the link earlier for images ||
Conclusion :
Pre-release hardware :
The itanium tested by us is, as you have noticed, a 667 MHz model. The versions wich will be released will run at 733 respectivly 800 MHz. The extra clockspeed on itself doesnt mean the Itanium will be massive amounts faster, but we have to take in account that the final version of the hardware might also undergo other changes , like faster revisions of the core , or a better IA-32 decoder. It is not very likeley tough that performance will massivly increase all of a sudden, but it wouldnt be a surprise if it still increases somewhat .
Pre-release software :
Windows Whistler itself is still beta, but also the IA-64 HAL (hardware abstraction layer) probably is far from finished. Microsoft will undoubtly optimize and speed up numerous things before releasing the official 64 bit operating system...wich offcourse equals better application performance.
Now, we did not know to wich degree the hardware was responsable for the bad performance, could have also been the software as you can imagine.
Lack of IA-64 Benchmarks.
We were unable to run Ia-64 software on the system, simply because it was nowhere to be found. You should take in account that the Itanium has been designed for the full 100% for IA-64 Code, and that hte IA-32 decoded was just a side-note for intel. The true power of the processor wont be lying in the tests we have done, but in applications wich are still in development. Early benchmarks utilizing IA-64 code on itanium systems have shown that the new architecture is sureley capable of outpacing the Pentium 4 at half the clockspeed.
Talking out of personal experience we can only discuss Whistler, the only piece of Itanium software we have seen to date. The operating system ran smoothly, from wich we could conclude that the Itanium in IA-64 mode is just as fast as a normale pIII or Athlon with equal clockspeeds.
Itanium , the bigger picture:
The itanium might not be the ideal performance, and certainly not have a good price/performance ratio, but that werent never Intels intentions. The first IA-64 processor was made to proof it is possible to develop software on it. The itanium is nothing more than a step-up for the second generation McKinley, wich will be spending its life in expensive databaseclusters. In 3 to 4 year the followups of Itanium will be emerging in your livingrooms, and that is enough time to improve on IA-32 performance.
The introduction of the new 64 bit EPIC architecture is , without a doubt, the longest lasting project Intel ever had, and the Itanium is just the beginning of what is ahead of us the next 25 years.
Final words:
The Ia-64 is a promosing architecture because of the revolutionary EPIC features it boasts, wich will enable us in the future to build more powerfull computers than ever before. There is still a long way to go tough, and before you stop looking at the sad IA-32 performance of the first chip and say that its not your game, look at the bigger picture.
athena.tweakers.net ||heh..thats not the bigger picture but you get their point .||
Finally, we would like to thank the person who made this review possible, his name has to be kept secret, but you know who you are!
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That was it...worth about 40 minutes of typing ...going to sleep soon , its pretty late here in the netherlands and i have to work in about 6 hours . Juck.
Goodnight people!
Greets, Michael da Kota |
