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Re: Current successes or opinions on Itanium

 
Tim Nelson
Honored Contributor

Current successes or opinions on Itanium

Looking for current experienced successes, failures, stories, and opinions on PA-RISC vs Itanium.

Points to all for responding.

Thanks in advance !!!

Tim

9 REPLIES 9
Florian Heigl (new acc)
Honored Contributor

Re: Current successes or opinions on Itanium

As far as I know we're in process of finishing the in-house certification of IA64 boxes for oracle/sap/whatever at the moment.

there were some minor quirks like pa-risc java jre in the ignite bundle and such, but I haven't yet heard of anything worse than that.

for me a very positive thing is the reduced startup times due to the firmware-based cpu and chipset tests, it's really saving tens of minutes for larger systems, which means reduced downtime in case things go wrong.
(And it really appears the tests are being done, too *g*)

[on the other hand I don't really trust the itanium roadmap yet, there's no more workstations available, and even microsoft appears to drop the support for IA64 now)
yesterday I stood at the edge. Today I'm one step ahead.
Tim Nelson
Honored Contributor

Re: Current successes or opinions on Itanium

Any performance vs costs comments ?

Performance vs cost on PA line compared to performance vs cost on Itanium line.
Jeff Wilkins
Valued Contributor

Re: Current successes or opinions on Itanium

We have switched 3 line control servers to Itanium rx2600. The performance increase is phenominal. Other than a memory leak that required a vendor code change we saw some good improvment. As mentioned in a previous post the starttup time decrease alone is amazing.
jfwilkins@hotmail.com
Tim Nelson
Honored Contributor

Re: Current successes or opinions on Itanium

Jeff, What did you upgrade from ? rp54xx / older L2000 ?

xxxMHZ to xxxMHZ ?

(Assigning 7s on points so the magic rabbit does not show up yet.)

Thanks !!
Florian Heigl (new acc)
Honored Contributor

Re: Current successes or opinions on Itanium

The price/performance ratio on itanium is really better than PA-RISC because HP is trying to push the Itanium sales very much, at times they were taking 20% of the already lower prices.

The only thing You have to look out for is the L2 cache sizes, many systems are only offered in 1 or 6 MB configs, while TPC runs are done with the 9MB models. I was told we referred specially to these versions as there's a huge difference in performance with 33% more cache. :)

But I bet a 1.6GHz PA-8800 would easily stomp a 1.6GHz Itanium. ;)
yesterday I stood at the edge. Today I'm one step ahead.
Alessandro Pilati
Esteemed Contributor

Re: Current successes or opinions on Itanium

I work on an Itanium platform rx 2600 and waiting for another one ( rx2620 ) to create a clustered architecture.
My personal opinion is that with Itanium processor HP wanted a substantial evolution from the old RISC architecture, that is aged more than 15 years.
The new architecture is based on the EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) that lets the processor execute more instructions per cycle than the current RISCs. For performances consideration,
have a look to this site, where itanium seems to stand in the 7th position:

http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2005&M=06

if you don't try, you'll never know if you are able to
Florian Heigl (new acc)
Honored Contributor

Re: Current successes or opinions on Itanium

It's the third position, the altix is itanium based. :)

but actually, the 'epic' is just a small cutoff of the EV8/9 alpha design, which most definitely is RISC.
yesterday I stood at the edge. Today I'm one step ahead.
Florian Heigl (new acc)
Honored Contributor

Re: Current successes or opinions on Itanium

And of course the numbers one and two are RISC, too. *smirks*
yesterday I stood at the edge. Today I'm one step ahead.
Julio Yamawaki
Esteemed Contributor

Re: Current successes or opinions on Itanium

Hi,

We have a cluster of two RP8xxx with 8 processors each, who was replaced by a two nodes RX4600 with 3 processors each.
We were using Oracle 9i in RP8xxx and changed to Oracle 9i RAC in Itanium
Performance of batch programas changed to 3 times in Itanium.
We have problem in using Oracle Transparent Gateway between Itanium platform and PA-Risc, but it's just an Oracle problem.
Installation of RAC was quite easy and we spent 30 days to migrate data from old platform to Itanium.