Hey, where’s Itanium?

If you’re scratching your head about our decision to evaluate G5 (PowerPC 970FX) and Opteron in one story, you’re not alone. This story was originally scheduled to pit Opteron against Itanium 2, but some funny things happened on the way to these pages.

Itanium 2 is simply not where we expected it would be by now. With the capability of running HP-UX, all Linux distributions, and Windows Server 2003, Itanium 2’s future seemed to be a lock. But all hell broke loose as the Big Three — Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun — went bananas for Opteron. These first-tier kingpins are now sources for Opteron-based two-processor and four-processor servers and workstation systems. Dell is the only holdout.

What’s all the hubbub? Windows. True, Windows Server 2003 runs on Itanium 2, but this fact hasn’t helped Intel’s cause. To be polite about it, Windows developers dislike working with the Itanium architecture. It’s unable to run Microsoft’s .Net Framework (although future support is reportedly in the works) and Windows developers must run Visual Studio .Net 2003 on their 32-bit desktops. They push their code to an Itanium 2 machine for running and testing, then edit and compile, then push the code back to the server and retest. This technique is most familiar to PocketPC developers. Microsoft’s own developers aren’t exactly cheerleaders for Itanium 2, either. They are outspoken, albeit strictly off the record, about the horrors of coding for this bizarre architecture. Their distaste for it is reflected in the poor representation of Itanium 2 compatibility in Microsoft’s enterprise server stack.

We had hung our hopes for this story on Intel’s low-voltage Itanium 2. This CPU is targeted at the entry market. The processor runs cool enough to squeeze into a 1U chassis, and a dual-processor system is affordable by Itanium 2 standards. Unfortunately, this new CPU tops out at 1GHz. And it’s still too damn hot. If we had let it into this shoot-out, a fair comparison would be impossible on so many levels.

We’re not giving up on Itanium 2 yet. It’s a dumb chip in search of a brilliant compiler. In other words, Itanium 2 has the unique quality of speeding up substantially as compilers get smarter. The necessary optimizations, which approximate designing a microprocessor from scratch with every compile, will become easier, and future generations of Itanium should do a better job of matching the hardware with the state of the art in compilers. If the architecture learns to be a bit more forgiving, and tools progress toward rapport with the architecture, Itaniums to come will be contenders. We’re glad we have plenty of processors to choose from in the meantime.