Dual core AMDs (was Re: [Gllug] Recording Ogg streams?)

[John Hearns]

On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 16:31 +0100, Christian Smith wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Jul 2005, John Hearns wrote:
> 
> 
> Even Intel wouldn't trend towards more complex CISC. They've been there,
> done that and it was a disaster. Itanium has flopped so far, but i432 was
> an order of magnitude less successful, being more expensive but about 4x
> slower than Intel's then current 80286.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i432
> 
> IA64 was a move to be "beyond RISC", to make the hardware even simpler and
> leave parallelism to the compiler, but Itanic has thus far failed to
> deliver volume penetration due to cost and compiler complexity.

Actually...

we sell a lot of Itanium systems. Really, really.
They are very good at what they do.
Mostly our customers use them for pre-processing of fluid dynamics,
generating the meshes for post processing on Xeon based clusters.

There were great hopes for Itanium - technically they are the best,
but again it is the volume versus specialism market, and they are not
going to win. Also hardware wise they are 'server grade' platforms,
so any ones I've seen are the Intel refernce design with hot swap
everything.



Compare with the Opteron - just install your existing 32 bit OS and run
existing codes, then migrate when it suits.
And we did just that with one of the first Opteron clusters in
Manchester, in 2003.



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