There are no stock designs for large scale MP based systems - these are
custom developed, and thus are found in high-end platforms. With the
amd64 processor architecture still being relatively new to the market,
the fact that you can buy an off-the-shelf stock 8 way Opteron processor
motherboard is (to me at least) nothing short of stunning:
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/vx50b4881.html
So, if you slap eight 885 processors on these (using the daughter card
setup) you end up with a 16 way box (8 processors, each with two cores)
with 128GB of physical memory - all from an off-the-shelf motherboard.
But AMD doesn’t make a native scaling 64-way processor - these are 8 way
scaling. The Intel Xeon was a 4 way scaling processor (going beyond
this required using custom built motherboards with private
interconnects). To go beyond 8 way scaling (16 processors with dual
cores) you have to play the same trick - build custom motherboards with
private interconnects. If I can spend $300k to build a rack full of
these stock machines it will be difficult for me to justify spending $3
million (or more) to build one custom-built ia64 (64 processor) machine
with 1TB of memory (double the memory, same number of processors.) I’d
do that if the problem I’m solving can’t be subdivided into disparate
components, but otherwise there’s no compelling advantage to the big box
model (and rest assured - even the 16 way amd64 server is a “big box” by
almost any reasonable measurement.)
With that said, my guess would be that the high end vendors thus now
fall into three categories:
(1) They already HAVE an ia64 64-way box; the NRE is paid, and they
don’t see any advantage to paying for NRE again in order to aggressively
develop a product that will make their previous ia64 box obsolete. (Note
that Intel likely falls somewhere in here, since they already have sunk
the money into ia64 and probably don’t see a compelling interest in
promoting amd64 any more than they have to for the moment.)
(2) They don’t have an ia64 64-way box and don’t see a need for a 64-way
amd64 box. Best way to save money is to never spend it in the first
place (and the bean-counters are happy).
(3) They see this as an opportunity and are now busily figuring out how
to build their own 64-way boxes. In that case, though, it will take
quite a lot of time (remember - this isn’t “slap it together” sort of
hardware engineering) before they have a working box. They’d have to
work closely with AMD (or perhaps some rebel group inside Intel) and
with the handful of prospective customers.
The real enemy of high end boxes (like the 64-way ia64 server) is that
there are very few customers for it. MOST problems can be solved using
loosely coupled systems (ergo clusters, a field in which it seems that
Microsoft has largely given up the battle to the Linux camp, solving the
“failover” and “load balancing” cluster problem with a shared nothing
solution that does a credible job of addressing medium sized scaling
issues, but punts the “big stuff”.)
But yes, ia64 is more “mature” in that it has been around longer for the
high end custom iron people to build into their stable and reliable
refrigerator sized computer box products. Amd64 is still young enough
that it has a long way to go before the high end people have the TIME it
takes to build such products (ah, but they will - the compelling cost
savings that come from using commodity products is a compelling siren
song.)
Regards,
Tony
Tony Mason
Consulting Partner
OSR Open Systems Resources, Inc.
http://www.osr.com
Looking forward to seeing you at the next OSR File Systems class in
Boston, MA April 18-21, 2006 (note new date - MS scheduled plugfest the
same week again.)
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Jan Bottorff
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 2:28 PM
To: ntdev redirect
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Windows 64 bit porting - AMD vs. Intel, Itanium
I think you’re jumping to an unwarranted conclusion here. The x64
architecture is simply not as mature as the ia64 architecture.
That’s a surprising statement. Everybody here is saying the IA64 is
dead,
and a zillion dollars are being spent on x64 processor R&D, but yet the
IA64
is more mature? The question I’m wondering is WHY are there multiple 64
processor IA64 systems, and very few 64 processor (only one that was
pointed
out to me) x64 systems?
Questions? First check the Kernel Driver FAQ at
http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256
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