[geeks] Carly's Gone!!!

[Jochen Kunz]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 15:14:12 -0800 (PST)
Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez <lefa at ucsc.edu> wrote:

> Most of the architects and VLSI folks seem to have been sold to Intel,
> so pretty much HP as a processor maker is a thing of the past, as sad
> as it sounds.
I know. There will be no real new PA design.

> Itanium2 is a decent performer, in fact for floating point intensive
> stuff its only real competition comes from IBM. So it is not that bad
> of a chip really...
Yes. It seems SGI is selling lots of Altix systems for number crunching.

I have to admit, I would not say no when I could trade my Octane for a
Prism. ;-)

> > >From what I heared one problem with Itanic is the need for
> > >exorbitant
> > high memory bandwith. That is the reason why intel put huge (and
> > thus expensive) caches on the chip.
> Well that is the same problem with almost any new CPU isn't it?
Sure. I have some old Alphas. The low end models have 64 bit memory bus,
the high end machines 256 bit wide memory... Alpha eats _lots_ of memory
(bandwith). But from what I heared Itanium is even worse then Alpha in
terms of memory bandwith.

> To be fair neither SMT nor differential high speed serial channels
> were invented because of alpha.
Interresting. Alpha was the first CPU that brought SMT and high speed
serial CPU interconnects to my attention. There where other (cc)NUMA
designes before, but to my knowledge Alpha was the first CPU that
implemented it on the CPU chip.
--


tsch|_,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/