Fall IDF 2005 - Day 2: Pat Gelsinger Reveals Intel's Server Plans
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 24, 2005 1:39 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
A bit on Itanium
As his final topic, Pat Gelsinger made sure to continue to pump Itanium 2 as a platform with life and Intel's support.
Pat talked a bit about Montecito and its expected performance relative to IBM's Power5 processor:
He also demonstrated the uses of Itanium 2, such as oil excavation and how it can impact the search for underground fossil fuels. According to SGI and Halliburton, each hole they drill in the ground for oil excavation costs approximately $100M. With earlier systems their hit rate on correctly placing these expensive holes in the ground was a mere 20%, but with the most recent Itanium 2 SGI systems that hit rate has blossomed to 70%.
Pat was also proud to announce that HP's long running Itanium 2 server is now capable of 99.99999% uptime, averaging no more than 3 seconds of downtime per year.
The bit on Itanium 2 concluded with a shot of a handful of Itanium servers. While Pat tried his best to convince the crowd that Itanium wasn't dead, there was little talk about the future of the platform and how it is going to survive these next few years as Intel's x86 architecture improves.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
11 Comments
View All Comments
Guspaz - Thursday, August 25, 2005 - link
A big deal was made over Microsoft Virtual Server's ability to move a virtual server to another physical box with no downtime. This is nothing new. Xen can alreay do this WITHOUT any special instruction extensions. As in, it can do it now, on any hardware.In addition, VMware's bluescreen demonstration is impressive until you realize that it too is nothing new; you can do the exact same thing on pretty much any virtualization solution, including older versions of VMware running on older hardware.
nullpointerus - Thursday, August 25, 2005 - link
Intel's virtualization technology is impressive because it is done at the hardware level, not because it was never done before. Read the last three paragraphs of this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor
So Vanderpool and Pacifica can efficiently run multiple, unmodified operating systems at the same time.
The blue screen thingy was a proof-of-concept showing that the Intel chip was working.
islandtechengineers - Sunday, August 28, 2005 - link
There’s a good point. It could be an attempt to help get the word out with multi OS server machines. I’ve witnessed a group load of server machines that aren’t cost efficient as a multi server setup. If I remember correctly (I haven’t checked out VMWARE lately), vmware required a host platform to operate properly and this appears to be their step up. I think it’s a great idea to run their setup without an initial host / parent.tanekaha - Thursday, August 25, 2005 - link
HmmChanging processors improved the good hole hit rate from 20 to 70%
Why ??
Were the old processors getting the sums wrong?
I can`t get my head round this.
You`d think all ya needed was more time on old processors
I`d appreciate enlightenment on this
Tanekaha
Calin - Thursday, August 25, 2005 - link
Yes, they were using the old Pentiums with error in FPU... (end sarcasm)I don't know for sure, but I think using processors that have more horsepower they can use more samples from previous holes. Some of these wells must be holed at a kilometer or more deep, and if one uses more sampling points in calculation, the results can be spectaculary better (or just as good, as this depends of lots of other factors).
However, doubling the points might increase the computing load ten times or maybe more. So, the need for better computers.
ceefka - Saturday, August 27, 2005 - link
Nice, if you still have to exploit Iraq (end sarcasm).jamawass - Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - link
Will they have on chip memory controllers?ceefka - Saturday, August 27, 2005 - link
All I saw on my quick read were massive on die L2/3 memory: 4 - 16MB and they are holding on to Hyperthreading.knitecrow - Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - link
All these Code names are making my heard hurtLeper Messiah - Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - link
so true...i'm confused as all hell when I read about sossaman, and tulsa and whichmacallit...