topic Re: Itanium in Integrity Servers

Itanium

jon.ose — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:14:00 GMT

Does anyone know when the joint venture between
HP and Intel for Itanium ends?

Can anyone tell me why one would upgrade to 9300s
from Itanium2 processors? They aren't much faster, and certainly are much slower than x86 processors.

Any plans from HP to run HP-UX on x86?

Thanks

Re: Itanium

Steven E. Protter — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:19:11 GMT

Shalom,

HP said to me in a meeting in April of 2010.

No plans to run HP-UX on x86.

I would expect however as Itanium features move to the x86 platform that position may be revised.

HP-UX runs like a blazing fastball (That guy from Cincinnati that throws 105 mph) in Itanium hardware.

Very good performance. Good platform for database servers.

The reason you go with Itanium is that you have a comfort level and confidence in HP-UX and your critical apps run on the platform.

At least that is why I would do it. Its not a decision made based in fairy tale processor speed tests.

SEP

Re: Itanium

rick jones — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:50:26 GMT

How do you measure "fast?"

Re: Itanium

jon.ose — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:58:36 GMT

how do you measure fast:
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results.asp?orderby=hardware

Look at the list of HP-UX versus Windows and Linux. These test are expensive and time consuming. HP has not invested in TPC testing of HP-UX since 07. This alone tells the story on what HP thinks of HP-UX and Itanium.

http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/cint2000.html

DL580 G7 Xeon X7560 32 cores=757
BL890c Itanium 9350 32 cores=531
rx8640 Itanium 2 32 cores =416

Re: Itanium

Alzhy — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:52:30 GMT

Not just "Fast" but TCO baby! X86-64 simply blows any RISC system these days.

Casie in Point:

HP Proliant DL580 G7
4 Processor Sockets (@dual thread and 8-cores)
1.8 TPMC!
@ .49 US Cents!

No costly RISC system even comes close. And this even simply runs Windows. (Rumour is Solaris 10 or 11 or Linux) could even do better.

But UNIX Fanbois may claim -- these X86 Systems lack the RAS of Itanium systems! False -- Proliant Systems with the Nehalem Chips now feature the same if not better RAS than Itanium. Note as well that Itanium 3 systems (aka Tukwilla Systems) share the same components and even enclosures as their Proliant cousins.

We just completed a massive DB workload migration from HP-UX to Redhat running on X86 Dunnignton and Nehalem SmartIrons and the results are stunning. We've lowered out TCOs (OS support, licenses,) and heck even our enerygy and cooling costs.

Re: Itanium

Alzhy — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:56:30 GMT

"I would expect however as Itanium features move to the x86 platform that position may be revised"

Eeh? What "features"?

The US$ 3 billion play by HP with Intel on the Itanium platform may possibly have problems being recouped.

HP is now actually likely the last Itanium man standing.

Shalom.