[geeks] New Itanium machines from SGI

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> Supposedly in it's current state, the itanium2 is supposed to rival the
> power of a single r14k chip.  SGI states that you can't pack Itanium2s
> anywhere near as densely in an air cooled system though.

I thought when companies jump platforms, they do it because the
resulting platform is -better- than what's already there (m68k->sparc,
m68k->PPC, m68k->MIPS), not because it can "rival" the current
offerings.  How is SGI pulling ahead here?

> There are numerous semi standard linear algebra libraries out there,
> and hand optimizing one or more of them for the itanium should make
> it a pretty stellar supercomputer for programs that can make good use
> of the chosen library.

This, too, is a step backwards from the status quo.  MIPSpro produces
excellent code, and the MIPS cores run that code with terrific speed.
There's still plenty of speed to tweak out of MIPS in future
generations--it's not like it's facing the same wall that the Pentium 4
is.

> I don't anticipate it being very good for other tasks like database
> management until the compiler situation is fixed.

And expecting a free compiler to emerge and help fix this problem is
absolutely the dumbest business plan that I've -ever- heard.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  *)  "everything i know about animals i learned from
Thorndale, TX      (*   ORA books."                  --alex j avriette