Intel is finally shipping the 64-bit Itanium

[W Bauske]

Bari Ari wrote:
> 
> Mark Hahn wrote:
> 
> >>
> > I can't imagine Itanium being a mass-market item for years, if ever.
> > and I pledge allegiance to the Orthodox Church of Beowulf, which
> > holds that if it's not mass-market, it's not cluster-Kosher ;)
> >
> The AMD Sledge/Hammer series will also be nice for clusters whenever
> they finally make it to market. Hopefully there will be some nice
> chipset support to go along with them. For the time being Mips has the
> price performance edge since nobody has taken the ARM 10 to market yet
> and Intel yanked the FPU out of the XScale before they released it.
> 

Help me out. I look at the SPEC2000 results for MIPS R14K and it
can't get to a P4 1.3Ghz level for either INT or FP. So, you're
telling me I can buy a MIPS 500Mhz R14K for less than $185? 

> It's great to see Beowulf clusters offering similar performance to
> traditional supercomputers for coarse grained applications and even some
> fine grained for a fraction of the cost, but X86 with OTS motherboards
> will also always be a kludge. X86 has 20 years of baggage for legacy
> support and also produce enormous amounts of heat as compared to RISC.
> 
> Low cost RISC clusters will outperform any x86 mass-market OTS clusters.
> RISC offers lower cost, smaller footprint, far less heat along with
> higher fixed and floating point performance.
> 

SPEC says you're incorrect on performance. I suspect your pricing is
off also, at least for R14K's. So, that leaves heat/power consumption, 
which I'd say is probably true.

Something you may not take into account that at least matters in what
I do is the raw performance per cpu. I prefer to have fewer high
performance nodes than, say twice as many lower performance nodes.
That can reduce the communication burden between nodes because you
give each node a larger part of the problem to solve. Depends of
course on your algorithm.

Wes