Microsoft Dropping Itanium Support For Clusters

upsidedown_duck writes "According to an article at TheStreet.com, Microsoft is opting not to support Itanium on its coming release of Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition. Instead, Microsoft will focus on AMD's offerings and Xeon."

Itanium is circling the bowl

[Erect Horsecock]

SGI and HP are the only ones left on the Itanic. HP looks to be hesitant anymore though, hell it plopped a fuckton of its own money on IA64 dev and just recently killed off its IA64 Workstations. One of the few places that Itanium sold fairly well.

Sun might bring solaris to it, but... why?

IA64 is a really cool chip (no pun intended) and I hate to see it flounder like this, but with PPC, x86, and SPARC all stepping up with new R&D.... Who needs itainium?

(oh and the nasa cluster based on it is neato)

Future

[Elithris]

This is a smart move. The Itanium was built for a niche market. Due to it's high price, and low performance to price ratio, the Itanium isn't popular. But Microsoft has so much weight that it could probably stop supporting intel processors and still come out alive, albeit heavily damaged. If I were Microsoft, I'd try to buy (or merge) with AMD or Intel, then stop OS support for my competitor, leaving them helpless. It would be risky, but if I were a selfish, inconsiderate, greedy, power-hungry, monopoly driven CEO, that's what I would do :).

Windows Supercomputer?

[ortcutt]

Does anyone want a Windows Supercomputer anyway? Does Microsoft really think they have a chance in this sector considering how entrenched *nix is?

Re:Windows Supercomputer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone want a *nix computer anyway? Does *nix really think it a chance in the desktop sector considering how entrenched Windows is?

Re:Itanium is Linux bound

[EyeSavant]

MIPS is dead.

SGI are pretty much commited to moving everyone to Itanic, they are only selling MIPS stuff to people who REALLY REALLY want backward compatability. MIPS chips are not going to get much faster, they are not going to bring out a proper new generation, most of the improvements are going to be from shrinking the gates on the chips.

Making a chip costs a stupidly big amount of money, and MIPS does not have the volume to justify it.

If Itanic sinks (really sorry) then SGI will eventually be bought up by IBM for their shared memory tech, and customer roladex.

SGI have bet the company on Itanic

Re:The correct response: So what?

[bani]

The problem here is that intel is sinking billions into itanic, its a black hole for money and intel keeps throwing more money into it trying to save face.

itanium has not delivered on a single design goal since its inception. intel went full steam ahead on itanium, placing bets on a number of key technologies to pan out in order to sustain itanium development -- all of which never happened.

so now intel is stuck with an incomplete chip with projected market share shrinking, support drying up, and partners abandoning ship.

intel continues to sink huge sums of money into itanium on an incredibly tiny niche market, which would be better spent investing on developing technology for their core markets. right now amd is eating them for lunch with amd64.

Re:Windows Supercomputer?

[luvirini]

Well, most are likely to be Business analysis types of things as the engineering departments of most companies tend to be more indepenedent. But you have to rememember that there is a huge number of computer science people in the world who have basically a windows based education. So the combination of those makes me think that the product in question might actually get quite many sales alsoe outside immediate business applications in the low end supercomputing arena. But the current ones I have seen have mostly been of the business-analysis type things.

Re:Future

[1000101]

"If I were Microsoft, I'd try to buy (or merge) with AMD or Intel, then stop OS support for my competitor, leaving them helpless"

I think that should read "If I were AMD or Intel, I'd try to buy (or merge) with Microsoft..." My point is that AMD or Intel would like to dominate their market completely. Microsoft already does that.

Re:Makes economic sense

[Paul Jakma]

Pentium Pro, another hyped up CPU that never really delivered.

Hang on, you are joking, right?

PPro has probably been Intel's best chip architecture to date. The initial P6 had bad 16bit performance, which made it a bad choice for consumers are that time, but it was very competitive in normal 32bit mode, idea for NT, Linux and other PC Unixen. The 2nd iteration of the P6 architecture fixed the 16bit issue and was enormously successful. The latest iteration of that arch (Pentium-M) is quietly outperforming the architecture designed to replace it, the P4, at nearly half the clock speed and far less power usage. Indeed, it looks like Intel will be going *back* to the P6 family in future as its 'frontline' PC architecture.

So you must be joking.

Any next generation chip left?

[sphealey]

Does that leave us with ANY next generation chip? Or are we stuck with the x86 architecture until 2020?

Too bad HP killed off the Alpha architecture in favor of Itanium. Maybe they could restart it...

sPh

Alpha's not dead !...

[Anne Honime]

... it just smells that way ; but hey, why don't HP take it out of its coffin, Intels starts printing 'Alphanium inside' labels, and here we go again !!!

Re:Oh great , the x86 arch. wheezes on a bit longe

[leathered]

Change the record.

x86 has come a long way over the years. We now have a multitude of streaming SIMD instructions and the biggest complaint of x86, the lack of GPRs, has been remedied by AMD in x86-64. It's cheap, relatively easy to code for and is not going away any time soon.

And you say x86 is power hungry? What does that make Itanic?

Re:dammit

[blether]

Microsoft have had 64bit Windows on Itanium for years now, so it couldn't have been hard to port Windows to amd64. They even had a public beta almost two years ago, but the release date just keeps on slipping.

Why? To keep Intel sweet when Itanium support is dropped, by giving Intel time to get an amd64 competitor into the market?

Re:The correct response: So what?

[Reziac]

I had a similar thought: this sounds to me like M$ refocusing on their own strengths, rather than trying to overreach to support something that's not really in their marketsphere anyway. I doubt it really has anything to do with Itanium's future, or lack thereof as the case may be.

[article type="doomed"]
-- FOO decides not to support BAR, which they never really did in the first place...
-- Slashdot immediately cries in full tongue, "BAR is dying!!"
[/article]

There! All such future stories are now dupes. ;)

Re:The correct response: So what?

[hackstraw]

itanium has not delivered on a single design goal since its inception. intel went full steam ahead on itanium, placing bets on a number of key technologies to pan out in order to sustain itanium development -- all of which never happened.

And which of the world's leading microprocessor companies do you run or even work for?

How do you explain the Itanium failing so badly in its design goals that it is #1 in memory bandwidth [virginia.edu]? How do you explain their failure when creating 2 of the top 5 [top500.org] computers in the world?

right now amd is eating them for lunch with amd64

Actually, its the Opteron that is competing with the Itanium processor, but you get extra /. bonus points for mentioning that AMD is better than Intel.

Re:Wrong... Again!

[voixderaison]

By "Power970" you seem to be referring to the PowerPC family. Don't forget that this chip family is based on the Power architecture from IBM (with some help from Apple and Motorola). The Power architecture contains other chips too, some of which don't have the limitations you cite. Certainly the chip architecture is fully capable of supporting machines with a larger number of CPUs [theregister.co.uk] running a single system image.

Although the really big (and custom) Blue Gene systems are apparently clusters, there isn't anything about the IBM Power Architecture [ibm.com] itself that would prevent large monolithic systems from being designed and built.

The SPARC [wikipedia.org] architecture can be used for machines like this, too. (Remember the CM-5? [geocities.com]).

Building a supercomputer with a large number of CPUs running a single system image is a unique task with a limited client base, and SGI has experience with that. A whole lot more than CPU choice goes into making it work. The way they tell it [sgi.com] it was quite a rush. The internal conversation must have gone something like this: "OK, team, we're going to build exactly one of these, and we already decided the price!" NASA doesn't build rockets like that, but SGI can build supercomputers like that. Impressive.

SGI deserves kudos. But if we step back and look at the big picture from the vantage point of SGI, it sure looks like SGI chose the IA-64 CPU for marketing reasons, not technical reasons. I'd have to guess that their engineering tasks would have been made easier by using a CPU that draws less power, for example. They've been on the ropes for years and conventional wisdom says to back Intel if you're in trouble because that's the safe bet for marketing. Why this remains conventional wisdom when the track record clearly shows that UNIX vendors who switch to Intel are cut up and fed to other UNIX vendors, is another topic.

You're right of course, that there are two different classes of super computers on the Top 500 list, with one class based on the cluster concept, and the other based on the concept of a single system image. Clusters are radically less expensive, and monoliths are better at certain computing tasks, and it's hard to compare them.

Monoliths often get custom case mods, though, and thus tend to look cooler. Who would hang a poster of a beowulf cluster of generic beige 1U rackmounts on their office wall? Everybody wants a poster of a Cray or a CM-5 or a Mach 5... [apple.com]

Hey! I just realized monoliths don't seem to look as cool as clusters lately. What's up with that?!