Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/485



The Spring 2000 Intel Developer Forum is definitely oriented towards a theme of starting a new family of processors, and what’s so interesting about it all is that by the end of this year, Intel will have launched brand new members of all of their processor families.

While the low end will see nothing more than an updated Celeron platform, the performance PCs, servers, and workstations will be enjoying the benefits of Intel’s updated IA-32 and brand new IA-64 architecture processors.

IA, an Intel coined acronym standing for Intel Architecture, is a term used to define the class of Intel processor that we’re dealing with. For example, the 32-bit Willamette that we talked about in our first IDF report on Tuesday is a member of the IA-32 family.

As quite a few of you already know, Intel began talking about their first IA-64 processor, which was then known as the Merced, quite some time ago. The Merced, as its classification as an IA-64 processor indicates, was to be Intel’s first 64-bit CPU and has been the talk of the town over here, although it is now known as the Itanium processor.

While most AnandTech readers are focusing on what Intel calls, the performance PC segment, and the resulting Athlon vs Pentium III comparison that emerges there, Intel is concerned with much more than competing on a desktop level. Intel is currently positioned as a leader in the CPU industry. Although AMD has recently given them quite a bit of competition with the Athlon, the fact of the matter is that most x86 workstations and servers are still predominantly Intel based.

We were talking to an Intel employee about exactly what this barrage of product announcements and demonstrations was really about. And his response was definitely an interesting one, basically he stated that Intel is concerned with making sure that the Internet as a whole is running on the fastest computers not exclusively home users. Intel’s view at the Spring IDF 2000 is a much more global one than we have seen from them or any of their competitors in the past.

Instead of focusing on competing in the desktop market alone, an area we often exclusively look at, Intel’s plans are to make sure that the entire web community as a whole is moved to this next level of processors. This means that not only the home users are running the next generation of IA-32 processors but the websites that they visit and the databases that they interact with are running the latest IA-32 and potentially IA-64 processors.

From the perspective of MCAD, 3D visualization, and other professional users, Intel is attempting to offer them more robust solutions with their new IA-32 and IA-64 processors that would be able to handle the complex designs that these users work with on a daily basis. Intel even told us that one of the customers for their IA-64 processor is Intel themselves. When designing the next generation of CPUs, the computational power required to display and manipulate the processor layout is growing considerably at a rate that will eventually result in the need, according to Intel, for the move to an IA-64 platform.



The Good & Bad of IA-64

As a member of the IA-64 family, the Itanium is obviously geared towards 64-bit application performance that is optimized for the processor’s technology. Unfortunately for the Itanium, most of the applications available at the release of the CPU later this year will still be for the IA-32 family. This brings up the most prevalent concern about the Itanium, its IA-32 performance. The Itanium will most likely be inferior to the Willamette in terms of IA-32 performance, which effects more users that those that would benefit immediately from the IA-64 support of the CPU.

As the transition from IA-32 to IA-64 takes place, the focus on the Itanium’s IA-32 performance will obviously decrease, however until the move to IA-64 technology as a standard is complete, at least for workstations and servers that don’t require the benefits of IA-64 and/or don’t feature IA-64 compliant applications, the Itanium won’t be an overly accepted platform.

One of the major benefits of the Itanium, courtesy of its 64-bit architecture, is the 64-bit memory addressing capabilities. Being able to address massive amounts of system memory is a demand that has been made by the larger online entities such as the search engines and e-commerce sites. But for the normal desktop or workstation user, being able to use 30GB of memory isn’t a major concern.

The integer performance of the Itanium is supposed to be "competitive" with the Willamette but the major performance benefits of the Itanium come from its powerful FPU. In the high-end workstation market, a powerful FPU is definitely a desired feature and the Itanium is designed to offer just that.

The Itanium as a processor will feature a fairly large Level 3 cache which gives it another benefit over the current generation of high end processors from Intel. If you look at the server market for example, most users are refraining to upgrade their 1MB Xeons to the new 800MHz Xeons simply because they have 1/4 of the L2 cache. The cache size of the Itanium should be a very attractive feature to most users that experienced a performance benefit courtesy of the Xeons with larger L2 caches.



The Chip

We managed to take a look at the Itanium processor first hand, and the CPU itself is a very interesting thing in itself.

The nature of the Itanium processor makes it necessary for multiprocessor configurations to be available at the launch of the processor. The workstation designs for the Itanium currently support 2-way MP configurations while the server designs support 4-way configurations.

The CPU itself is a socketed design, but there are no power pins on the connector. Instead of supplying power to the CPU via its connector pins, there is a separate power connector on the edge of the Itanium card itself that is used to supply power to the CPU. The reasoning behind this is that by supplying power to the CPU via a separate connector, Intel could decrease the pin count of the CPU itself while still maintaining a high density pin interface.

The chipset support is provided courtesy of the i460GX chipset, the successor to the i450GX, a high-end Slot-2 chipset. The 460GX supports PC100 SDRAM and PC1600 DDR SDRAM only, but we were given the impression that shipping Itanium systems would be using DDR SDRAM alone. The reason for using SDRAM & DDR SDRAM is because most high end servers and workstations feature large amounts of memory, and a more expensive memory technology such as RDRAM would increase the overall cost of Itanium servers by an almost unmanageable amount.

As we briefly alluded to earlier, the 460GX supports up to 4 processors in a very interesting physical configuration. Two processors can be supported via an extended ATX form factor motherboard, but a quad processor configuration is a bit more complicated. The quad processor board design features a double sided motherboard, with two CPU interface sockets on the top of the board and two on the bottom of the board. Because of this, a quad processor Itanium system can be considerably smaller than a quad processor Xeon setup which is a major consideration in the server environment where rack space is expensive.

Your average Itanium setup will probably come in a 7u case, which is a bit on the large side, but is still decent. According to Intel, the cost of ownership for an Itanium server should be in the same range as a Xeon server would be.

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