Gilboa Davara wrote:
> It remains to be seen.
> I'm almost certain that the Titanic2 will outperform anything on this
> planet in FPU performance.
> But as long as Intel doesn't improve the ALU performance and bus
> design, it'll continue to produce lackluster Integer and memory
> performance, forcing Intel to further increase their already ridicules
> L2/L3 cache size. (Which in turn, produces a huge core with lower
> yields, shooting the Titanic's price into the "I sold my lungs for a
> dual machine" range.)
> Intel is currently losing money on the Itanium, and lots of it and
> using the Xeon's huge profit margin to sustain it.
> Never the less, the Itanium, though being a expensive-lack-luster
> performance from day one, did do one thing: It killed off most of the
> competition making room for the Xeon to become their main server CPU
> design.
> The biggest Irony is that the Itanium is improving, It's actually a
> solid option for FPU intensive applications; However, now that Intel
> has competition in the enterprise market, I wonder how much longer
> they'll continue to finance this black-hole when they can no longer
> artificially sustain such huge profit margins on the Xeon.
>
> Gilboa
So I take it you would take Itanium for a computation cluster doing
fluid simulations, but not to a database server or a search engine. Right?
Shachar
If you're looking for a computation cluster, I'd wait for for the 1.8/2.0Ghz dual core Montecito core (which AFAIK, should be released in Q1/2006?).
However, it greatly depends on the release price. If the current price prevails, it's cheaper to buy a quad dual-core Opteron then buy a quad single core Itanium; No matter how fast the Itanium's FPU unit is, I doubt that a 1.5Ghz core can outperform two 2.2Ghz cores...
However, before you choose, I'd also take a look at IBM's power4/5 systems. At least from a design perspective, their multi-core design is top dog.
As for database (or any other Integer intensive applications), I'd go with an IBM/HP dual-core Opteron based machine. Without doubt.
Considering it's price, an Opteron 165/265 is simply a steal.
Gilboa
