Hi Guys,
I'm on a mission to investigate the new 64bit capable hardware; cpu, etc. I've been reading about the Intel Itanium and the Amd opteron and was wondering what your feeling are regarding the industry that drives these two processors, as well as the status with linux (red hat) and these new processors?
About the time that IBM dropped their Itanium Line one of the engineers was quoted as saying that "the itanium is a science project". Itaniums are expense and not easy to obtain but some research institutes do have them. (Including some very big beowulf clusters). Currently the Itanium is pretty much a little production product from Intel which probably helps inflat the cost. It has very good floating point performance but it's integer performance is nothing to write home about. Since a good number of the people with Itaniums are doing beowulf clusters, linux support is definitely available.
Opteron is a full production product that has native 32bit support as well as the 64bit support. It is comparable in price and performance with a Xeon processor but it also provides the advantages of 64bit support. In some cases, we have seen it way out perform a Xeon (Atlas).
Linux support is good but everyone is pretty much only releasing support via their Corporate or Enterprise additions. Hence you can't really download ISOs (RedHat has Enterprise 3.0 Beta ISO available as well as The Technology Preview GinGin64). I believe both SuSE and Mandrake allow you to install their Corporate server versions via ftp.
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