A few weeks ago I went hunting for MANY processor Windows systems (like 64
processors) and ONLY found IA64 systems with this many processors. It seems
like the x64 architecture does not scale to lots of processors. The real
question was: are there ANY systems that aren’t cache coherent between I/O
and the processors, and it seems like many processor IA64 systems were the
only systems where this was an issue. The question came up in the context of
RDMA and correctly following Windows DMA requirements.
- Jan
Intel product line for commodity systems has moved to processors that
(unless they are deliberately crippled) are AMD64 capable. IA64 is as dead
as Alpha or PowerPC, it just isn’t official yet.