Originally posted by agreenster
a.) Not much can beat the Itanium. It is a 64 bit processor (much like the G5 is rumored to be) and is super-fast. Its biggest drawback was that it really slowed down 32 bit apps (which almost all are) and therefore didnt sail well in the market. I assume that the Itanium2 has managed to address some of these issues. 64 bit processors are cutting egde (at least as far as consumer models go- SGI has been using 64 bit for quite some time) and include the Itanium, AMD's Hammer, and supposedly the G5.
Actually, in the market in which the Itanium is marketed to compete, a lot of chips can beat it. It is really not a chip for a desktop computer, and it was never intended to be. It's very expensive, there's no software for it, it draws a hell of a lot of power, and performance-wise, it's not too great (decent FP speed; below-average integer speed). It was never intended to run 32-bit software; it is an entirely new architecture that had hardware x86 emulation grafted onto it only to satisfy Intel's marketing department. Nobody who is buys an Itanium plans to run 32-bit software on it.
x86 and the PowerPC are the only two major 32-bit CPUs out there right now; pretty much all the "higher-end" chips (MIPS, Itanium, Alpha, PA, SPARC, and POWER) are 64-bit and have been for the past decade or so, or at least since their inception in the cases of the more recent ones.
I expect the Pentium 4 will either be dropped soon and replaced with the Itanium, or keep their name and just change the architecture to 64 bit eventually. Plus, the mHz rating REALLY doesnt matter near as much with these processors. An 800mHz Itanium will absolutely roast any consumer processor on the market.
Not true. SPEC_CPU2000 scores put the 2GHz P4's FP speed dead even with the 800MHz Itanium's. The P4's integer speed is nearly double the Itanium's.
Barring some sort of unprecedented come-from-behind miracle of miracles on Motorola's part, the G5 will be obsolete upon its introduction. Assuming Motorola is able to pull off a G5 (at any clock speed) that is three times faster than the 1GHz G4 - and that's a big if - its integer speed will still be only barely faster than a 1.3GHz IBM POWER4, and its FP speed will barely be half as fast. Granted those are very different markets, and granted the POWER4 is not currently sold in any computer costing less than $40,000 today, but Motorola's competition is hardly sitting still, and it is likely that by the time the G5 is a year old, the POWER4 will be available in a sub-$6000 IBM Unix workstation and everyone will be salivating over the new POWER5, which will knock the G5's socks right off.
Alex
