AMD price cuts

[Uraniun235]

full list

Some selected examples:

AMD Athlon™ 64 X2:

Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (3.0GHz, 125W, 2MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport™ bus, socket AM2 ) $178
Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (2.8GHz, 89W, 2MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport™ bus, socket AM2) $157
Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (2.6GHz, 89W, 2MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport™ bus, socket AM2) $136
Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (65nm, 2.6GHz, 65W, 1MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, socket AM2) $125
Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (90nm, 2.6GHz, 89W and 65W 1MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, socket AM2) $125
Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (65nm, 2.5GHz, 65W, 1MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, socket AM2) $115
Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (65nm, 2.3GHz, 65W, 1MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, socket AM2) $94
Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz, 65W, 1MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, socket AM2) $83
Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz, 89W and 65W, 1MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, AM2 and 939) $89
Athlon 64 X2 4000+ (65nm, 2.1GHz, 65W, 1MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, socket AM2) $73

AMD Turion™ 64 X2 (Mobile):

TL-66 (64-bit, 2.3GHz, dedicated1 1M L2 cache, 1600MHz HyperTransport™ bus) $354
TL-64 (64-bit, 2.2GHz, dedicated1 1M L2 cache, 1600MHz HyperTransport™ bus) $263
TL-60 (64-bit, 2.0GHz, dedicated1 1M L2 cache, 1600MHz HyperTransport™ bus) $220
TL-56 (64-bit, 1.8GHz, dedicated 1M L2 cache, 1600MHz HyperTransport bus) $184
TL-52 (64-bit, 1.6GHz, dedicated 1M L2 cache, 1600MHz HyperTransport bus) $154
TL-50 (64-bit, 1.6GHz, dedicated 512k L2 cache, 1600MHz HyperTransport bus) $154



Intel is expected to follow on the 22nd.

[phongn]

ArsTechnica has a rundown as well.

[Starglider]

Damnit I'm still waiting for some proper K10 benchmarks so I can get on and buy a new workstation (choice between Intel and AMD depends on what performance on the new chips will actually look like after they've finished tweaking the silicon).

[The Kernel]

Damnit I'm still waiting for some proper K10 benchmarks so I can get on and buy a new workstation (choice between Intel and AMD depends on what performance on the new chips will actually look like after they've finished tweaking the silicon).

At this point the likelyhood of Barcelona being a performance winner seems pretty low. They might be able to get out a decent performing part by the middle of next year, but by then you also have Penryns in the 3.5Ghz range to contend with...

[InnocentBystander]

I kinda feel shafted having a 939 and DDR ram here. I was hoping to do a processor upgrade this summer on the cheap; but It would be more economical to just go AM2 at this point.

[Starglider]

At this point the likelyhood of Barcelona being a performance winner seems pretty low.

Sadly this is true, but I have been a very satisfied AMD customer for several years (x86-64 was extremely helpful for what I've been doing, without AMD taking the initiative Intel would have kept trying to push their Itanium crap and there still might not be a cost-effective and easy to deploy 64-bit option by now) so I'd like to give them the chance to surprise me.

[The Kernel]

At this point the likelyhood of Barcelona being a performance winner seems pretty low.

Sadly this is true, but I have been a very satisfied AMD customer for several years (x86-64 was extremely helpful for what I've been doing, without AMD taking the initiative Intel would have kept trying to push their Itanium crap and there still might not be a cost-effective and easy to deploy 64-bit option by now) so I'd like to give them the chance to surprise me.

Loyalty to a chip vendor seems rather silly to me. Just buy whatever the best price performer is out there and if AMD can come back with something better someday, give them your business then.

And btw, there is nothing wrong with Itanium in principle. It is an excellent 64-bit architecture and the only real problem is the lack of full speed backwards compatibility with x86.

[Starglider]

Sadly this is true, but I have been a very satisfied AMD customer for several years... so I'd like to give them the chance to surprise me.

Loyalty to a chip vendor seems rather silly to me. Just buy whatever the best price performer is out there

I do, but I don't have an urgent need for new machines right now, so I am prepared to wait a bit. Ultimately though I will buy the machines that perform best on the applications I want to run.

And btw, there is nothing wrong with Itanium in principle.

There are a lot of things wrong with Itanium in principle. The design is based on a series of broken assumptions. It's like a PhD student's 'novel processor design' thesis that somehow got made into a decade-long industry trainwreck. It sounds clever until you actually look at trying to run real code on it. The very few things that it does well are done far better by true vector processors and Fusion-type architectures will render it utterly irrelevant.

Any other company would've been ruined by it; Intel just lost a huge amount of money, but on the plus side their wildly optimistic PR scared several of their competitors into scrapping their own server processor lines.

It is an excellent 64-bit architecture

No, it is not. It only eventually managed to achieve semi-acceptable performance by having stupid amounts of cache tossed at it on huge bloated dies. The logic never worked properly and utterly threw away the basic RISC advantage that the design was supposed to be building on, resulting in pathetic clock speeds. It never achieved good price/performance even if you can write custom software for it. It is an absolute bitch to write compilers for and pretty nasty to program in assembler if you're actually shooting for maximum performance (x86 is crufty, but at least it's tolerant). By comparison SPARC is a great architecture from a programming point of view; POWER is nearly as good and has had a string of excellent microarchitectural implementations recently.

and the only real problem is the lack of full speed backwards compatibility with x86.

Itanium failed for many more reasons than that.

[phongn]

Damnit, Starglider, you beat me to the anti-IA64 essay To be fair, though, in some scientific workloads it does very well.

[Starglider]

Damnit, Starglider, you beat me to the anti-IA64 essay

I've written actual essays on the subject many times. At this point I've euthanised so many Intel-fanboy-Itanium-wank threads that I'm just summarising. I was really excited about Itanium too circa 2000 (it helped that I was seriously studying microprocessor design for the first time), but it turned out to be a pile of junk while AMD came out of nowhere and did the impossible; made x86 actually not suck.

To be fair, though, in some scientific workloads it does very well.

In a very few scientific workloads it does a little better than POWER 5. This advantage is likely to be removed by POWER 6, which is in all respects a nicer platform anyway. However the trend is very much towards heterogeneous multicore designs that integrate massively parallel stream-optimised cores with highly serial branch-optimised cores on the same die. This will far outperform Itanium on all the things Itanium is actually good for, and it sucks as a control processor. Two further facts (beyond the wild optimism with regard to compilers) have been working against it; steadily increasing transistor counts make all that complex prediction & out-of-order logic that Itanium was so keen to throw out not so expensive after all (in fact a major reason Core has such good IPC is even better prediction & out-of-order logic than the P4), while the overheads unique to the Itanium design proved to be much worse clock scaling barriers than the congenitally optimistic initial projections suggested.

[phongn]

I've written actual essays on the subject many times. At this point I've euthanised so many Intel-fanboy-Itanium-wank threads that I'm just summarising. I was really excited about Itanium too circa 2000 (it helped that I was seriously studying microprocessor design for the first time), but it turned out to be a pile of junk while AMD came out of nowhere and did the impossible; made x86 actually not suck.

My graduate computer architecture class went over VLIW in some detail - and the issues with compilers is just too overwhelming. I was hoping back then for a new "clean slate" to replace the mess that is x86 but it was not to be

SPARC, MIPS, POWER - all clean ISAs (hell, 68K was pretty clean, too) but almost all crushed by the might of the X86 juggernaut

In a very few scientific workloads it does a little better than POWER 5. This advantage is likely to be removed by POWER 6, which is in all respects a nicer platform anyway. However the trend is very much towards heterogeneous multicore designs that integrate massively parallel stream-optimised cores with highly serial branch-optimised cores on the same die.

I'm not so sure about heterogeneous multiprocessing at the CPU-level, to be blunt. I don't really see the advantages there compared to conventional homogeneous designs, especially with such huge transistor budgets as we have now.

This will far outperform Itanium on all the things Itanium is actually good for, and it sucks as a control processor. Two further facts (beyond the wild optimism with regard to compilers) have been working against it; steadily increasing transistor counts make all that complex prediction & out-of-order logic that Itanium was so keen to throw out not so expensive after all (in fact a major reason Core has such good IPC is even better prediction & out-of-order logic than the P4), while the overheads unique to the Itanium design proved to be much worse clock scaling barriers than the congenitally optimistic initial projections suggested.

Well, conversely, POWER6 is an in-order(!) design for integer and vector processing - and its SPEC scores are trouncing everything else out there. Sometimes there is something to be said about getting rid of that expensive OOOE logic

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I wonder if Intel will finally drive prices down. I was hoping to do an upgrade on my computer come fall.

I'm not familiar with the problems of the x86 design, but what are they?

[Chris OFarrell]

Think of a CPU like a basic lego block, nice and clean and well designed.

Then spend a decade or two randomly adding on other lego bits and random lego bits to those lego bits.

[phongn]

I wonder if Intel will finally drive prices down. I was hoping to do an upgrade on my computer come fall.

Intel has been driving prices down for decades

I'm not familiar with the problems of the x86 design, but what are they?

Variable-length instructions, segmented memory, nonorthogonality, the most screwed-up FPU architecture devised by man (stack-based ... even if the rest isn't) ... oh man, the list goes on and on.

Think of a CPU like a basic lego block, nice and clean and well designed.

Then spend a decade or two randomly adding on other lego bits and random lego bits to those lego bits.

That implies that x86 originally was clean and we know it wasn't even then 68000 was much more elegant and clean and hailed from the same era!

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Intel might hold off their price cuts if AMD doesn't dish out Barcelona soon enough. Was thinking of seeing how the Quad Core processors will perform.

But yeah, Intel has been keeping prices down... with some external stimulus. I might switch to Intel if AMD continues its buffoonage.

[The Kernel]

There are a lot of things wrong with Itanium in principle. The design is based on a series of broken assumptions. It's like a PhD student's 'novel processor design' thesis that somehow got made into a decade-long industry trainwreck. It sounds clever until you actually look at trying to run real code on it. The very few things that it does well are done far better by true vector processors and Fusion-type architectures will render it utterly irrelevant.

At this point it would probably be difficult to argue with that, however we have yet to see vector or GPU processing go much of anywhere with the HPC crowd. Time will tell I suppose.

No, it is not. It only eventually managed to achieve semi-acceptable performance by having stupid amounts of cache tossed at it on huge bloated dies. The logic never worked properly and utterly threw away the basic RISC advantage that the design was supposed to be building on, resulting in pathetic clock speeds. It never achieved good price/performance even if you can write custom software for it. It is an absolute bitch to write compilers for and pretty nasty to program in assembler if you're actually shooting for maximum performance (x86 is crufty, but at least it's tolerant). By comparison SPARC is a great architecture from a programming point of view; POWER is nearly as good and has had a string of excellent microarchitectural implementations recently.

Itanium has achieved a modest success (not given the initial investment, but that's a sunk cost anyway at this point) with the HPC crowd and these are a very fickle bunch, most of them buy the fastest performing machine and don't give much of a crap about compatibility. The fact that Itanium can compete in this market at all proves that it is price/performance competitive.

Also I should point out that Itanium doesn't have the R&D resources thrown at it that x86 does. It's manufacturing process is always 1-2 generations out of date, and they don't go through design revisions nearly as fast as with the x86 teams.

Itanium failed for many more reasons than that.

That's why it failed to be even considered as an x86 replacement. You can't even get x86 users to effectively switch to x86-64, let alone a brand new ISA.

[Uraniun235]

I think we could see a transition to x86-64 sometime in the next several years.

[phongn]

I think we could see a transition to x86-64 sometime in the next several years.

It's slowly happening, mostly because both Intel and AMD's current and future plans all have x64 processors. It doesn't cost all that much more to produce and Microsoft is planning on dropping x86 in the next major version or two of Windows.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I think we could see a transition to x86-64 sometime in the next several years.

It's slowly happening, mostly because both Intel and AMD's current and future plans all have x64 processors. It doesn't cost all that much more to produce and Microsoft is planning on dropping x86 in the next major version or two of Windows.

Oh? What are they switching to?

[The Kernel]

I think we could see a transition to x86-64 sometime in the next several years.

It's slowly happening, mostly because both Intel and AMD's current and future plans all have x64 processors. It doesn't cost all that much more to produce and Microsoft is planning on dropping x86 in the next major version or two of Windows.

I think that the only reason you'll see the transition is because of memory limitations...there seem to be no other reason for anyone to actually make the move.

[The Kernel]

I think we could see a transition to x86-64 sometime in the next several years.

It's slowly happening, mostly because both Intel and AMD's current and future plans all have x64 processors. It doesn't cost all that much more to produce and Microsoft is planning on dropping x86 in the next major version or two of Windows.

Oh? What are they switching to?

x86-64.

[phongn]

I think that the only reason you'll see the transition is because of memory limitations...there seem to be no other reason for anyone to actually make the move.

It's a reasonable enough reason, though. The added GPRs and ditching of x87 is just a bonus, too

[Starglider]

My graduate computer architecture class went over VLIW in some detail - and the issues with compilers is just too overwhelming.

It isn't just 'issues with compilers'. With the amount of money and talent Intel threw at the problem, if it was just an 'issue' it would've been fixed long ago. On many problems it is intrinsically impossible to accurately predict at compile time exactly what the data mix and code path usage is going to look like, at least without a great deal of extra metadata from the programmer (which few programmers would know how to give and getting it wrong would be considerably worse than useless). For non-scientific applications the task is greatly complicated by the ever more pervasive use of dynamically linked and just-in-time compiled code.

I was hoping back then for a new "clean slate" to replace the mess that is x86 but it was not to be SPARC, MIPS, POWER - all clean ISAs (hell, 68K was pretty clean, too) but almost all crushed by the might of the X86 juggernaut

Yeah well blame Intel, they could've licensed one of those, they could've just come up with a sane design, but no they have to turn a research project into an attempt to dominate the industry. On the plus side, at least Itanium has killed the EPIC concept dead. If it was a research project the enthusiasts might still be whining 'oh but if only enough money was available for compiler development'.

I'm not so sure about heterogeneous multiprocessing at the CPU-level, to be blunt. I don't really see the advantages there compared to conventional homogeneous designs, especially with such huge transistor budgets as we have now.

It's pretty clear. For the same transistor budget you can have 4 conventional cores or 80 stripped down in-order stream-optimised cores. GPUs utterly blow away conventional processors for highly parallelisable highly predictable computation, this is why GP-GPU is so exciting. However, the bus is a bottleneck (in bandwidth and latency). Heterogeneous cores allow you to have serious highly parallel stream computation working in close synchrony with highly serial control code. The advantage is an order of magnitude more computing power on tasks that parallelise. The tools to do this easily are hard to write, but nowhere near as hard as EPIC compilers, because they don't have to be telepathic.

Well, conversely, POWER6 is an in-order(!) design for integer and vector processing - and its SPEC scores are trouncing everything else out there. Sometimes there is something to be said about getting rid of that expensive OOOE logic

In many senses POWER6 appears to be a version of the Pentium 4 that actually works. The P4 design picked up a lot of criticism because the performance of the product was relatively sucky (compared to the Opteron, it still blasted past SPARC and usually PowerPC in single processor tests), but the essential problem was that the design was based on predictions about process advancements which never came to pass in the actual lifetime of the product. If you can do it without melting the chip, cranking the clockspeed is (pretty much) always preferable to messing about with parallelism, because higher serial speed accelerates absolutely anything while all parallelism-based improvements (beyond simple pipelining) have limited applicability. If Itanium had launched at 2 GHz and was now running at 4 GHz, it would actually be worthwhile.

At this point it would probably be difficult to argue with that, however we have yet to see vector or GPU processing go much of anywhere with the HPC crowd. Time will tell I suppose.

You are kidding right? You do realise vector computing was supercomputing from the Cray-1 onwards right? Massively parallel clusters didn't begin to come in until the late 80s (Connection Machines actually kicked that off but then utterly failed to capitalise on their lead for internal politics reasons). Even now there's a considerable market for custom, dedicated wide-vector processors. However ultimately hoards of small FP cores with SSE equivalents are going to ouperform them. GP-GPU has a lot of people very excited and is getting a lot of press but it's taking a while to ramp. Ultimately though die level integration of massively parallel FP crunching is more flexible, rather easier to use and for many applications faster than FPGA-based co-processors, the previous 'hot trend' that was getting a lot of press and attention.

Itanium has achieved a modest success (not given the initial investment, but that's a sunk cost anyway at this point) with the HPC crowd and these are a very fickle bunch, most of them buy the fastest performing machine and don't give much of a crap about compatibility. The fact that Itanium can compete in this market at all proves that it is price/performance competitive.

Itanium barely competes in this market. If it wasn't for the fact that competing architectures (e.g. MIPS, Alpha) were withdrawn just out of fear of Itanium and several supercomputers would not sell you anything else for several years, it wouldn't have gotten any traction at all. As it is Itanium is rapidly on the way out, partners have been steadily jumping ship and Intel has been cutting resources dedicated to it.

Also I should point out that Itanium doesn't have the R&D resources thrown at it that x86 does.

Itanium had a ridiculous amount of R&D resources thrown at it, far more than the Opteron got or that Sun or IBM throws at their processors. The only design that got more was the P4, and I'm not even sure about that; sources inside Intel consistently report that all the best talent went to work on Itanium in the late 90s and early 2000s. Stop trying to be an apologist. Itanium did not work and attempts to make it competitive were the processor equivalent of lipstick on a pig. It is dying and will probably be gone by 2010.

You can't even get x86 users to effectively switch to x86-64

Outright lie. Linux supported it at launch. Fully x86-64 servers were possible within a year, and many new servers and HPC installations were in fact to take advantage of the large flat memory addressing. Vista is 64-bit by default, 64-bit binaries are now the norm even for such consumer things as games and Microsoft Office.

I think that the only reason you'll see the transition is because of memory limitations...there seem to be no other reason for anyone to actually make the move.

Ah, and it finally becomes clear that you are a pathetic Intel fanboy. 64-bit integer processing is extremely useful in many applications, such as cryptography and anything involving large bitfield manipulation (I use 64-bit integers pervasively in our code). The doubled register set is helpful for performance in nearly all applications and easy for compilers to take advantage of; x86 is actually register bottlenecked, whereas IA64's grossly inflated register set is too big to get much use out of in most situations.

[The Kernel]

You are kidding right? You do realise vector computing was supercomputing from the Cray-1 onwards right? Massively parallel clusters didn't begin to come in until the late 80s (Connection Machines actually kicked that off but then utterly failed to capitalise on their lead for internal politics reasons). Even now there's a considerable market for custom, dedicated wide-vector processors. However ultimately hoards of small FP cores with SSE equivalents are going to ouperform them. GP-GPU has a lot of people very excited and is getting a lot of press but it's taking a while to ramp. Ultimately though die level integration of massively parallel FP crunching is more flexible, rather easier to use and for many applications faster than FPGA-based co-processors, the previous 'hot trend' that was getting a lot of press and attention.

Amazing how you can put all that into a paragraph to just repeat exactly what I said while claiming the exact opposite.

And FP scalability is but one of the things that IA-64 has over x86, but it isn’t the only thing.

Itanium barely competes in this market. If it wasn't for the fact that competing architectures (e.g. MIPS, Alpha) were withdrawn just out of fear of Itanium and several supercomputers would not sell you anything else for several years, it wouldn't have gotten any traction at all. As it is Itanium is rapidly on the way out, partners have been steadily jumping ship and Intel has been cutting resources dedicated to it.

What a load of horsecrap. Evidence that Intel is cutting resources to the Itanium division? They were one of only two divisions to suffer zero job cuts during the last round of cuts, I see no evidence of Intel withdrawing resources from the project.

Also, your supposition that MIPS and Alpha were retired from the HPC space because of Itanium is laughable, you need to go back and reread your history. If you have evidence to this effect then present it.

As for you OTHER laughable assumption that Itanium is dying with no market demand...

From ZDNet

Even before Intel launched "Montecito" processors to much fanfare last month, the Itanium Solutions Alliance has been cranking up its engines in anticipation of strong demand for the platform. And, Hewlett-Packard is proving to be its biggest supporter so far.

By the end of the year, the Itanium Solutions Alliance (ISA) expects to have 10,000 applications available on Itanium systems, up from 8,200 currently. The ISA is a partnership formed by major tech companies with the aim of speeding up the development and adoption of software for Itanium-based platforms.
Advertisement

William Wu, who chairs the Asian arm of the ISA, told ZDNet Asia: "The rate of ported applications is phenomenal and a real sign that the industry's appetite for Itanium is getting larger than ever."

In the first six months of 2005 alone, he said, Intel added 1,000 applications onto Itanium, including Oracle's e-Business Suite and Fusion middleware, SunGard's financial services applications, Microsoft's SQL, SAS' v9 and Symantec Storage Foundation.

Currently, ISA has 11 global centers for ISVs to access development tools and Itanium hardware systems. By the end of the year, there will be 20 such centers, said Wu.

However, Rajnish Arora, IDC Asia-Pacific's enterprise server and workstation research director, noted that while Intel may claim to have big numbers in application support for Itanium, the true picture may be clearer if one discounts the applications previously available on the HP-UX operating system running on PA-RISC and Alpha machines.

According to IDC, HP is the primary vendor selling Itaniums systems in the Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan region, accounting for 95.2 percent of total unit shipments and 91.8 percent of revenues sold in the first quarter of 2006. Other Itanium vendors include Silicon Graphics (SGI), Unisys, Samsung and Bull.

In total, 1, 914 Itanium systems were shipped in that quarter, raking in revenues worth US$73.6 million for the region.

Arora said: "I would ask how many, out of all Windows, Linux and Unix ISVs, [has Intel] never had an engagement [with previously]. The number of new ISVs would be a good indicator in gauging how much new success [Intel has] broken with Itanium."

It is one thing to get existing ISVs running software on HP-UX or Alpha Unix and move them to Itanium, and another to encourage "brand new ISVs" which had never previously offered their applications on HP systems to port their applications on to HP-UX running on Itanium systems, he pointed out.

"It's largely a HP play in the market," he said. "Apart from HP, there are not many other vendors which can design, market and sell [enterprise-class Itanium] systems."

Arora added that in the Asia-Pacific region, Itanium-based Unix server sales are primarily driven by existing PA-RISC/HP-UX and Alpha/Tru64 Unix enterprise clients that are either migrating existing workloads or deploying new ones.

"The number of customers migrating off Power and Sparc to Itanium is still a fairly small number," he said.

According to IDC, Itanium-based systems grew 41.8 percent year-over-year worldwide in the first quarter of 2006, generating US$640 million in revenue. This segment now represents 11.2 percent of all non-x86 server revenue.

In addition, there are other key players in the overall server market apart from HP.

Roadblocks ahead
According to IDC, in the first quarter of 2006, HP and IBM tied for number one position with 28.1 percent and 27.9 percent share, respectively, in terms of global server revenues.

Dell Computer maintained third place with 11.1 percent market share in the same quarter. Although the company's year-over-year revenue growth slowed to 3.6 percent for the quarter, Dell managed to gain new market share.

Sun experienced a 5.8 percent year-over-year revenue growth, and increased its overall market share to 10.8 percent, from 10 percent in the same quarter last year.

Intel, which pits Itanium processors directly against Sun Microsystems' Sparc and IBM's Power chips, claims the company has made headway against its competitors.

Citing IDC figures, Intel's Wu noted that in the first quarter of 2006, global revenue from Itanium systems represented 45 percent of revenue from Sparc systems and 42 percent of revenue from Power systems. In fact, he added that Intel's fourth quarter-2005 Itanium system revenue surpassed Sparc in both Japan and Korea.

Arora noted though that uptake for Itanium servers on Windows and Linux has slowed down significantly, primarily due to the performance boost that x86 servers have had with the introduction of new technologies such as 32-/64-bit hybrid systems and dual-core systems from AMD and Intel, in the past two years.

IDC Asia-Pacific figures found that in 2005, 58 percent of Itanium systems were sold with the Unix operating system. In the first quarter of 2006, this number increased to 72.2 percent.

In comparison, about 30.4 percent of all Itanium systems sold last year were on Linux. By the first quarter of this year, this dropped to 18.4 percent. Similarly, 11.6 percent of Itanium systems sold last year ran on the Windows platform, but this number dropped to 9.4 percent in the first quarter of 2006.

Without the support of other major server vendors such as Dell and IBM, it seems that for now, at least, HP will remain Intel's biggest ally in pushing Itanium.

Arora explained: "HP's large share of Itanium server sales both in the Asia-Pacific region and worldwide, has further expanded in the past one year after IBM and Dell decided to exit, at least temporarily, due to lackluster demand for Windows and Linux workloads on Itanium."

It's hardly all roses for Intel, but Itanium sales are respectable and increasing year after year. At this point the Itanium division is paying for itself so there is no reason to kill it.

Itanium had a ridiculous amount of R&D resources thrown at it, far more than the Opteron got or that Sun or IBM throws at their processors. The only design that got more was the P4, and I'm not even sure about that; sources inside Intel consistently report that all the best talent went to work on Itanium in the late 90s and early 2000s. Stop trying to be an apologist. Itanium did not work and attempts to make it competitive were the processor equivalent of lipstick on a pig. It is dying and will probably be gone by 2010.

The current Itanium design team is ~350 in Ft. Collins and ~250 in Hudson, which is no where near the amount of engineers allocated to x86. Yes a ton of resources went into the IA-64 ISA DESIGN, but that's not the same thing.

And as for your supposition that Itanium will be dead by 2010, show me some fucking evidence. The sales figures don't bear it out and neither do the Intel roadmaps.

Outright lie. Linux supported it at launch. Fully x86-64 servers were possible within a year, and many new servers and HPC installations were in fact to take advantage of the large flat memory addressing. Vista is 64-bit by default, 64-bit binaries are now the norm even for such consumer things as games and Microsoft Office.

Yeah, and what's the 64-bit Vista sales rate compared to 32-bit? Oh right, practically zero.

Ah, and it finally becomes clear that you are a pathetic Intel fanboy. 64-bit integer processing is extremely useful in many applications, such as cryptography and anything involving large bitfield manipulation (I use 64-bit integers pervasively in our code). The doubled register set is helpful for performance in nearly all applications and easy for compilers to take advantage of; x86 is actually register bottlenecked, whereas IA64's grossly inflated register set is too big to get much use out of in most situations.

Don't be a moron, I'm talking about the only reason you are going to get the vast bulk of users to switch to 64-bit is because of the memory address limitations.

[The Kernel]

I think that the only reason you'll see the transition is because of memory limitations...there seem to be no other reason for anyone to actually make the move.

It's a reasonable enough reason, though. The added GPRs and ditching of x87 is just a bonus, too

Oh sure, but it's like how everyone switched to DVD just so they didn't have to rewind their VHS tapes. The lack of ass quality video was just a bonus.