Dan (dan@norcliffe.com) on 2/5/09 wrote:
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>Thanks David, an interesting read as usual.

Thanks, I'm glad you appreciated it.

>It seems to me that despite the negativity I so often read >about the Itanium, it
>has a bright future. In mid-2009 it's looking like it'll get (at last) a very big
>performance boost, then within 18 months reaching process parity with Xeon MP can
>only help it improve in leaps and bounds.

Yup, it should be exciting times. In all fairness though, at the same time, Xeon MP will also improve by leaps and bounds. As Linus pointed out accurately, SPARC won't threaten IA64, x86 will.

>One of your points, that of Itanium sales being level with >Xeon MPs, was quite
>a surprise to me - in my own experience I've specced and >managed quite a few Xeon
>MPs but only one Itanium, I didn't realise it was doing so >well.

I think the later poster who said they were within an order of magnitude was about right.

I don't have hard numbers for IPF vs. Xeon MP, but it's not hard to figure out how many Xeon MPs are shipping.

I think at one point, Intel said that 10% of CPUs are servers, and maybe 10% of that is Xeon MP, so you're talking about 2M Xeon MP.

Itanium obviously isn't selling 2M/year, but we know that it's more than 300, so 500K-700K/year isn't an unreasonable guess.

>One question - is there any possibility of a rebirth of >the Itanium workstation
>platform any time soon? A 2-socket Tukwila workstation >would surely help the Itanium
>world develop and grow significantly, don't you think? Or >is the power draw going to preclude that this time round?

I don't know. I think the big question is whether OEMs can make money slinging workstations. HP withdrew b/c of lack of demand, and x86 has basically taken over that market.

The big problem is that workstations are now all Linux, Windows and OS X, there's no advantage to using HP-UX, AIX or other UNIX variants. You're just better off with Linux in almost every way. And once you're on Linux, x86 is the cheapest way to go.