Re: Itanium versus Others

John Savard wrote: 
Intel's Itanium chip is rather expensive, and its MHz speed is not as
high as that of their Pentium 4 chips. Now, of course, we have the AMD
64 chips and Intel's EM64T. Is there a point to Itanium?

Wondering that, I looked up benchmark results, and found that as far as
floating-point performance, at least, is concerned, there certainly is.

I also came across IBM's POWER5. It also performs comparably to an
Itanium, but with a higher MHz speed. And I found out that the POWER5
isn't the same as the PowerPC G5 from IBM used in high-end Macintosh
computers. It's considerably more powerful, and it is a bulky multi-chip
module with four dual-core chips.

Since the POWER5 appears 'exotic', it does seem to me that the Itanium
is just about the only 'supercomputer-like' chip easily available; and,
of course, a single core providing the same throughput as eight cores
will do it with considerably less latency as well.

John Savard
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I'd be inclined to put the Itanium in the "exotic" category.  It's a
departure from mainstream architectures and not all that ubiquitous.

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