Q: The future of IA64 (i.e. HP-UX)
Ulrich Windl
as HP-UX only supports PA-RISC (which is declared dead by HP) and
Itanium (IA64, which Intel would like to declare dead), I wonder what
the future of the HP Integrity servers and HP-UX looks like.
The last seven years, the Itanium frequency rose from 1.3GhZ to 1.6GHz,
and there is no perspective of seeing faster CPUs. At the same time the
x86 architecture at least doubled the clock speed. Also, seven years
ago, the Itanium memory speed was great, but meanwhile the typical home
computer is quite close to it.
The design promises for IA64 look great, but the products seem to
suck...
Regards,
Ulrich
Michael Kraemer
In article <87tz464...@pc9454.klinik.uni-regensburg.de>, Ulrich Windl
<Ulrich...@RZ.Uni-Regensburg.DE> writes:
> Hi,
>
> as HP-UX only supports PA-RISC (which is declared dead by HP) and
> Itanium (IA64, which Intel would like to declare dead), I wonder what
> the future of the HP Integrity servers and HP-UX looks like.
for a customer: switch to AIX on Power ? :-)
(SCNR)
Benjamin Gawert
> as HP-UX only supports PA-RISC (which is declared dead by HP) and
> Itanium (IA64, which Intel would like to declare dead), I wonder what
> the future of the HP Integrity servers and HP-UX looks like.
What future? PA-RISC is dead, and as soon as most customers have moved
to something else (x64/Linux?) IA64 will die, too, together with HP-UX
and OpenVMS.
> The last seven years, the Itanium frequency rose from 1.3GhZ to 1.6GHz,
> and there is no perspective of seeing faster CPUs. At the same time the
> x86 architecture at least doubled the clock speed.
Not only that. Together with the clock speed the FSB frequency rose as
well, providing a cheap home PC processor with a better memory bandwidth
than the expensive high end Itanium2.
> Also, seven years
> ago, the Itanium memory speed was great
Was it? Seven years ago the Itanium2 had a 400MHz FSB (QDR), exactly the
same as the first generation Pentium4. However, when Itanium2 was still
running at 400MHz FSB the P4 Northwood was already running at 533MHz FSB
and 800MHz FSB shortly after. And on FSB-based systems the FSB is the
bottleneck for memory I/O.
>, but meanwhile the typical home
> computer is quite close to it.
Quite close? I suppose it's more the other way around. Even the current
Montvale Itaniums runs at 667MHz FSB max while most current and last
generation Core2 processors and XEON 5300/5400 series processors already
ran at 1066MHz, 1333FSB or 1600Mhz FSB. And just forget about the Core
i7 or the new XEON 5500 series (Nehalem) with integrated memory
controller, in terms of memory performance Itanium probably doesn't see
any light compared with those.
> The design promises for IA64 look great, but the products seem to
> suck...
I would not say these products suck (they do a great job). However, you
have to realize that this is a niche product with a very small and
constantly shrinking market which is less and less ready to pay the
premium above standard hardware if the latter does the job as well. This
is not unique with IA64, it was the same for other platforms like
MIPS/IRIX or now SPARC/Solaris as well.
Benjamin