[rescue] SunBlade 2000 vs SunBlade 2500 vs Ultra 45

[Phil Stracchino]

Jonathan Patschke wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Aug 2009, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> 
>> Itanium, realistically, sucked from day one.  It cannot reasonably be
>> described as having ever been a successful processor.
> 
> Say whaaaat?
> 
> The 1.5GHz Itanium 2 CPUs (released 2003) in my rx2600 are just barely
> beaten by 2.6GHz CPUs (released 2006) in my Mac Pro.  That is, running
> Mathematica's benchmark on a Mac Pro ranks it just 20% faster than a
> rx2600 per core.  I'm not entirely sure, but I would assume the benchmark
> does not use a large enough dataset to thrash the memory bus.

Oh, sure, the processor *works*.  I didn't mean to imply it didn't.  But
it so failed to meet its expectations for market penetration that even
Intel sighed, conceded the inevitable, and followed the amd64 lead.

> Early on, this was true because the compilers for the platform had not
> matured.

Indeed.  A lot hadn't matured early on, and by the time it did finally
mature, the market passed it by.  That was my primary point.  It
*works*, but its overcomplexity prevented it from being a commercial
success.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.