Dell Dumping Itanium 170
njcoder writes "In a PC World article it is disclosed and confirmed by Intel that Dell is dropping support for Itanium processors. 'After Advanced Micro Devices demonstrated that 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set offered a smoother transition to 64-bit computing, Intel released a version of Xeon with similar technology, and Dell now offers 64-bit Xeon processors across its product line.'" More from the article: "The chip maker has since backed off its original statements about Itanium and is now promoting the chip as a high-performance replacement for reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors in Unix servers from companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. Hewlett-Packard, a co-designer of the processor, has embraced Itanium as the processor of choice for its high-end servers. Fujitsu. and NEC are also among the system vendors that sell servers with the processor." The story is also being reported at Ars Technica.
I Blame Sun Microsystems (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I Blame Sun Microsystems (Score:1)
I must say, that was a most entertaining ad campaign, and Sun's new servers really do seem to be really, really good. It'd be nice to see Dell go down in the entry-level server space.
I blame Intel (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I Blame Sun Microsystems (Score:2)
Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:5, Interesting)
One has to wonder, outside the obvious explanation of Intel's anti-competitive trade practices, what is Dell's aversion to AMD 64-bit / dual-core processors?
Clearly there is significant (and growing) demand for Opterons.
Dell's outright refusal to offer AMD chips seems almost like proof of itself that Intel is acting in an anti-competitive manner.
Has Dell ever put forth a better explanation?
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO that's not an acceptable explanation for offering zero AMD servers.
Its not as if Dell sells AMD servers at a higher price. Clearly there is an enormous amount of demand for Opterons. All the market metrics show Opterons taking a larger and larger piece of the server market. Dell's server business is hurting as a result, and still they offer no AMD machines.
Furthermore, if as you say "Intel offers a better deal" -- and that deal was based upon exclusivity. (In other words: "You get a 15% discount if you sell only Intel chips"), It seems to me that that would be illegal and anti-competitive.
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:1)
Not knowing the explicit details of the Intel / Dell relationship there must be financial incentives for Dell to remain loyal to their partner Intel. And they don't necessarily have to be illegal or anti-competitive. Fact of the matter is that Dell hands off a lot of R&D to partners like Intel. It's doubtful that they would get similar levels of R&D support from AMD. Secondly there is a cost to doing business with m
not anticompetitive! (Score:5, Informative)
What on earth do you mean? That's about as standard as it gets. It's called exclusive licensing, and that's the way it goes. Companies offer price incentives to sign exclusive deals. It's competitive because Dell is free to sign exclusively with anybody.
Here some other examples: Your job. Your company offers you $100,000/year to build widgets *exclusively* for them. If they wanted a clause in your contract that said that you may not build widgets for anyone else, you aren't going to say it's anticompetitive.
How about your car? Toyotas ship with (I'm making this up) Panasonic audio components. If you asked Toyota to make a line with Zenith components, they'll probably say "sorry, but we have an exclusive agreement with panasonic."
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it assuredly is not illegal.
Re:not anticompetitive! (Score:2)
Interestingly enough, except for the high end stuff, Toyota does ship Panasonic car radios :)
Re:not anticompetitive! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:not anticompetitive! (Score:2)
Microsoft couldn't get away with it because hardware distributors didn't *really* have a choice with the OS they shipped, so if Microsoft says "take IE or jump in the lake", their options are to ship IE or find a new line of work, because they won't be selling hardware without windows on it.
Fortunately for us, there are other chip manufac
Re:not anticompetitive! (Score:3, Insightful)
> Fortunately for us, there are other chip manufacturers than Intel.
As there are other operating systems besides Windows. I don't think the definition of monopoly requires singularity.
Re:not anticompetitive! (Score:2)
Before this thread goes in farther, I call no "It would be like Coke doing %s with Pepsi" analogies!
Re:not anticompetitive! (Score:3, Informative)
It is arguable whether Intel has monopoly status or not.
Re:not anticompetitive! (Score:1)
"We will sell you our chips at a 15% discount. What? You want to offer AMD chips also? In that case we will NOT sell you our chips (or the chips have a 100% markup, or whatever they do). See how well you business does when you can't offer Intel! Pssh...AMD...we'll show them"
Re:not anticompetitive! (Score:2)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:1)
I don't think that word means what you think it means. You seem to be viewing "competition" as something that would somehow benefit you, while sticking it to the man. Kind of like a chicken debating the ethics of being fried or baked; you're still cooked at the end of th
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, then, you're a retard. Why would someone give up a N-where-N-is-large% discount from the supplier that will provide 95% of your processors just so you can sell 5% of your volume with processors from another vendor? How are you going to explain to your shareholders that you're going to raise production costs by millions of dollars just so you can do a couple million dollars more in sales? Do you honestly think that AMD is able t
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
If a company made any effort to use AMD's products, some companies have reported that Intel would "suddenly" run out of important server-class chips to ship out to them, and marketing incentive payments would dry up and not be paid. Intel
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
Funny, HP has a very broad line of Opteron systems, but, as far as I can see, has no shortage of Intel processors and is probaly getting getting their incentives pretty much as usual because HP sells a lot more Xeon-systems than Opteron-systems and neither HP nor Intel would wan
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2, Interesting)
Intel uses a very effective pull marketing strategy. Most consumers don't care about what processor they have. They don't understand it and they don't care to learn. However after their commercials, the name is known which makes the name sound reputable. Because of their "Intel inside" advertising, people aren't going out and buying processors, but demanding them from retailers.
In addition, humans get confused easily. If y
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:1)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:4, Interesting)
One has to wonder, outside the obvious explanation of Intel's anti-competitive trade practices, what is Dell's aversion to AMD 64-bit / dual-core processors?
I think that Intel gives a slightly better volume discount to Dell than anybody else. Partly this is because Dell's volume is bigger than most anyone else (I forget if they have exceeded HP yet), but the obvious suspicion is that there is also an "exclusivity bonus" - yet lower prices for a vendor who does not sell any of the competition's products. If Dell actually sold AMD Opteron based products, I suspect they would do very well on those products, but if they drove up their costs on every other system they sell, all still containing Intel cpus, then it might be a net loss, at least initially.
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
I think that Intel gives a slightly better volume discount to Dell than anybody else. Partly this is because Dell's volume is bigger than most anyone else (I forget if they have exceeded HP yet), but the obvious suspicion is that there is also an "exclusivity bonus" - yet lower prices for a vendor who does not sell any of the competition's products. If
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
Indeed, as an "exclusivity bonus" is just a nice way of saying there's a penalty for giving their competitor any business.
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
I once spent a long afternoon eating ice cream, because the proprietor of the shop (my uncle) told me I could have as much as I wanted a
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
no you can't
where is this link?
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:1)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:1)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:4, Insightful)
No its not like saying that at all.
If Coke said to your local supermarket: "We'll give you a 10% discount if you don't stock Pepsi -- even though Pepsi represents 36% of the market", that would be anti-competitive behaviour.
The case already went before the Japanese Trade Comission and AMD won. I have a hard time believing that the scenario is different in the US.
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
Coke is saying "We'll give you a better discount than any of your competitors if you don't sell Pepsi".
If I can sell Coke cheaper than any one else, people will go out of thier way to buy from me.
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:3)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
Notice that 7-Eleven and other convenience stores frequently have both brands in their coolers because of the low overhead costs? You'll be hard pressed to find any company with only type of bottled beverage. They all carry both.
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:1)
You'd think that having AMD "demonstrate that 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set offered a smoother transition to 64-bit computing", the likes of Dell would realize where the real innovation is coming from and begin diversifying.
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:1)
AMD is offering Dell tremendous discounts on their chips--probably selling to Dell at prices other PC assemblers can only dream about. This allows Dell to sell at rock-bottom prices. For Dell and Intel this creates a "virtuous circle" where Dell builds increasing market share using only Intel chips.
I am sure Intel will offer Dell "wha
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
> "I am sure Intel will offer Dell "whatever" it takes to keep the exclusive arrangement"
What you're describing is illegal anti-competitive behaviour.
What's in a name? (Score:2)
No opinion on the technical merits from this minimally-technical consumer, but, FWIW, I can draw the "Intel inside" logo from memory...
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
Dell seems to be quite good convincing people that this is true, but it's certainly not.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158117&cid=13
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
So far, that is not happening. I for one woul
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? (Score:2)
Because ultimately anti-competitive behavior *always* hurts the consumer.
Just when you think you're winning on pricing, it usually turns out you're losing on innovation.
Don't forget SGI (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Don't forget SGI (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Don't forget SGI (Score:3, Interesting)
I did. Is that bad?
Seriously, I remember them being the biggest name in graphics back in '96. I thought they were dead and gone.
Re:Don't forget SGI (Score:2)
But that was graphics hardware and this time it's CPUs, so I'm sure things will turn out just fine for them.
Not long now for SGI (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't forget SGI (Score:2)
Strange, that.
SGI once had its own line of very sophisticated and top-performing 64-RISC processors called MIPS that did exactly that until they drank the intel itanic Kool Aide. (And Windows NT as well, but that's a whole nother rant).
Look at
Ummmm .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Writing has been on the wall (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel has spent billions on Itanium and seen an effective return of 0%. Investors won't tolerate this for much longer. AMD's x86-64, and Intel's subsequent introduction of EMT64 (same thing), have finally pushed this ill conceived idea into its well deserved death spiral.
It has no technical merit. But technical merit sometimes is a secondary matter in the business world. However, the economics don't make any sense - you can't introduce a new ISA into a mature software market and expect it to fly just because you're Intel.
It was a mistake - write it off and move on.
This should free Intel to deploy those valuable Itanium engineers (like the ex-Alpha team) to work on something that actually generates cash (like x86 servers). So while AMD might have a short term lead - the giant resources of Intel are more than enough to catch up and re-assert their leadership position.
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:4, Insightful)
Excuse me? Modded +5 Interesting, but incorrect on this one point.
I hope you just made an honest mistake and don't really believe that nonsense.
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:5, Insightful)
I am paid to design processors and have worked on SPARC, MIPS and x86 designs for a span of over 12 years.
I spend my days thinking about how to improve processors. That's all I do... all day long.
So please... enlighten me on how the Itanium architecture improves computing on any metric.
Any performance advantage that you see today is solely due to their having much larger die size and pin count budgets vs. other processors just to compensate for their having a crappy ISA. If you give the same budget to a comparable x86 or traditional RISC processor, their absolute performance and performance/watt would far exceed any Itanium.
Put a 9MB cache on an Opteron and see how well it does on SPECFP for example.
An Opteron beats the Itanium 2 handily on integer code with just 1MB of cache.
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:3, Interesting)
> So please... enlighten me on how the Itanium
> architecture improves computing on any metric.
Personally I like the predicate registers, conditional execution and rotating register files - a neat way to pipeline loops without unrolling. I like the concept of VLIW-style without huge amounts of nop padding (although it
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:2)
Some of these have obviously been done before to varying degrees (but I've not heard of rotating register files in a general purpose chip).
Isn't that way a Sparc does when the input registrars become output registrars during a function call?
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:2)
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:2)
All I see is a 200+ million transistor chip or even a 400+ million transistor chip, that can't do specint faster than x86 chips with 100+ million transistors (or even less). And only do specfp maybe 2 x faster.
And even then, I wonder if the specfp stuff the Itanium is so good at can be split up easily to multiple chips. In which case you might as well have two x86 chips using 200 million transistors (dual core).
Basically you get more performance per transistor for most
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:3, Insightful)
Many of the Alpha team went to work on the Opteron. Or did you think that it's resemblance to the Alpha was a coincidence?
And I don't really think Intel need to do much catching up. They are behind in the server market, and ahead in the laptop market. The server market is shrinking, and the laptop market is expanding - it sounds like they are
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:2)
The fingerprints are there
Intel doesn't just have the Alpha team. They also have the ex-PA-RISC team from HP. I hear they're not too shabb
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:2)
It's a real loss to everyone that the industry won't just drop the damned architecture. MIPS64, PowerPC, IA64, Alpha, and UltraSPARC are vastly superior to x86. One of the reasons that all of those architectures have lower clock speeds than current x86 is because they still execute more ins
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:5, Interesting)
As transistor budgets increase exponentially (thanks to Moore's law), that fixed overhead gets smaller and smaller each generation - to the point that it's insigificant (less than 5% today and getting smaller tomorrow). So in the early 90s you could make a case for more efficient computing with RISC vs. x86, but today it's just so negligable that you don't care. There are also numerous micro-architectural tricks to get around the limited registers and wacky addressing modes.
Couple this with the fact that 99% of all of the world's software is written for x86 and you have a very large inertia to overcome in order to change the ISA.
Why would any software vendor port their application to a new architecture if that architecture is brand new and nobody is using it initially? This is a very expensive and risky task. Let's say that the incentive is increased performance with a new ISA (highly unlikely given that the ISA doesn't matter anymore given the very large transitors budgets). But let's be generous and give it a 50% performance advantage (again - this is fantasy land). Do you spend the 8 months porting, debugging, testing Photoshop? Or do you just wait 8 months for a 50% faster x86 to come out and instead spend that time improving your product as opposed to keeping it the same on a different architecture?
You'd have to be crazy to take that tradeoff. And so, you see what we have today - x86 everywhere.
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:2)
Really? Better tell the Debian [debian.org] guys then. They ship their distro for 10 platforms [debian.org]. Then there's the BSD's: NetBSD takes the cake with 49 platforms [netbsd.org] listed as stable. OpenBSD has 16 platforms [openbsd.org] and FreeBSD has 9 platforms [freebsd.org].
I think you'll find that most software nowadays is written in a high-level language and not for a specific processor. If you ha
Re:Writing has been on the wall (Score:2)
Since the x86 CISC stuff is translated to RISC like stuff, you can think of it as on-the-fly decompression.
Compressed code (x86) is stored in slow main memory and caches, and decompressed to RISC ops in the CPU (with the P4 the risc ops are in the tracecache).
So the x86 isn't that bad. Since disk and RAM is slow, smaller programs are a good thing. Caches a
Once again, crap wins (Score:3, Funny)
You've got less expensive yet outstanding technology that suffers from poor market share (for the time being)... Opteron
And then you have a bloated, legacy, piece of shit technology that's a crude copy of Opteron, a Pentium 4 with hastily tacked on 64 bit instructions (copied from AMD), a technology that Intel doesn't even believe in, that they themselves think is inferior.... Xeon
Guess which one will dominate the market?
Sometimes IT really does suck.
Re:Once again, crap wins (Score:2)
It can join
The DEC Alpha
Commodore Amiga
Atari ST
Zilog Z8000
680x0 ISA
Tandy 2000
Zenith 100
And so on...
In evolution cockroaches have an advantage.
Re:Once again, crap wins (Score:3, Funny)
McDonalds, the world's largest restaurant chain that wins countless awards every year for culinary excellence and whose head chefs have sold millions of copies of their recipe books.
AOL, the geeks' favourite ISP reknowned for their quality tech support who can effortlessly guide you through tunneling VNC over SSH at 3 o'clock in the morning.
General Motors and Ford, the greatest car companies in the world who consistantly teach their Japanese counterparts lessons in safety and reliability.
Dell, th
Itanium isn't ALL that bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually use an Itanium... (Score:3, Interesting)
Deja vu (Score:2)
Weren't they sayin the same damned thing when the first 32-bit Pentium chips came out over a decade ago? They've been catching up to RISC for how long now?
Re:Fair play (Score:1)
Think back many years to when AMD was known as "Advanced Micro Devices" and made Intel compatible chips. That's why we had the "Pentium(tm)" and not "586" being marketted.
Re:Fair play (Score:5, Informative)
No, Intel tried (and failed) to trademark a number and so had to come up with names.
Re:Fair play (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, then Intel may sue AMD aswell because of the x86 32 ISA, right?
In fact x86-64 is pretty much the same instrucion set except that it has been extended to support 64-bit registers, etc. So you could very well say that x86-64 ISA is a derivative of the x86-32 bit ISA.
Of course intel and AMD have cross-license or some shit so they can use whatever stuff they want without licensing issues, but i think it was worth the post
Re:Fair play (Score:2)
AND that it has twice the registers.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:1)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:1)
At least Raider fans can spell. And with the Niner record over tha last few years, you'd think that Niners could spell lose forwards, backwards, and in their sleep!!!
Re:Hmmm. (Score:1)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:1)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:1)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)
Let's try that out...
Dell are not ethical.
Hmmm... I'm having a little problem here.
Let me add some words...
People who randomly slam Dell are not ethical.
Works better, but is meaner...
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)
I worked for an organization that basically built an entire wall of Dell servers.
Their shenanigans made us so unhappy, five years later that wall was replaced by a mix of Sun and IBM blades.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)
Here in the States, they're parakeets.
But still make nice metaphors for bird-brained bosses.
I haven't bought a Dell for ten years now, and in that time handled at least three million dollars American in acquisitions.
Even the random white-box servers performed better.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)
My Gran had a couple of budgies
Which is precisely why I moved things over to Sun (that and previous experience , which was mostly with Spark servers )
On the main issue of the article
Re:Hmmm. (Score:1)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:4, Informative)
I used to reccomend Dell's to people, I no longer do because of the nightmare the Tech support is, INCLUDING the platinum support level for the high end servers. I have a 8450 server loaded with a 7 foot tall rack of powervaults connected to it and It was like pulling teth to get the thing fixed. the techs blamed the "cables" of the powervaults several times and took 2 weeks to get us up and running again after a fatal crash because the powervaults were starting rebuilds of spare drives and then offlining them breaking the raid 50.
dell tech support sucks. that is why we are moving back to HP.
I type this from the best laptop that I have ever had, a Lattitude D800, the hardware is sound, but they drop the ball everywhere else.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:1)
ServerWorks (Score:2)
ServerWorks chipsets are fairly common, and not bottom-of-the-barrel crap from some random Taiwanese company. ServerWorks is presently a division of Broadcom focused on high-end server applications. They're most common in large processor configurations (quads, 8s, etc.), with Intel having taken over of
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)
I know you have to pay for it, (i believe it's $179/yr) but dell has it's warranty parts direct program [dell.com]
Basically, if you know what's wrong, and the product is under warranty, you can go to a web page and order the part you need. No need to wait on hold for 30mins just to re-troubleshoot the problem with somebody reading from a script when you know that your hard drive is dead.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)
Re:to the management (Score:2)
It took me three seconds to find this [dell.com] one. "Front and rear IEEE 1394 (firewire) ports and rear S/PDIF port."
Re:to the management (Score:2)
Hopefully you'll get bored and leave soon enough. Or maybe we'll get lucky and science will develop a cure.
Re:Still good for Intel's business (Score:1)
Let S be sales:
S(Itanium)S(PA-RISC)
S(Itanium)>S(ALPHA)
S(Itanium)>S(MIPS)
So Intel sends most of the competition in the high end packing. But the guys making PA-RISCs MIPSs and ALPHAs transfer the R&D costs (Sun has not produced a viable spac in years, The latest chips come from Fujitsu, and the Niagara design comes from a startup they bought, check IEEE Spectrum) and Fab costs (how much does a state of the art 90nm fab costs nowadays?
Re:games (Score:2)