SAN JOSE -- While the chips weren't quite up to snuff, Intel Corp. and itspartners demonstrated functional Itanium silicon at this week's LinuxWorld conference in San Jose.
At least three companies showed off Itanium systems on the show floor: Intel, with help from VA Linux Systems Inc. and Mission Critical Linux, Silicon Graphics Inc., and NEC Corp. In fact, NEC demonstrated a 16-way Itanium way server using its
custom-designed Azusa chip set.
However, the Itanium chips did not perform anywhere near the promised speed of 800 MHz. Intel of Santa Clara, Calif., recently pushed back the Itanium's release date three months or so until
the fourth quarter, when pilot development systems are scheduled
to be released.
Instead, Intel's LinuxWorld efforts included demonstrating
500-MHz, pre-production Itanium chips in its own booth and with
SGI, which also had a system containing a 733-MHz Itanium chip,
an SGI spokesman said. NEC representatives declined to
comment on the clock speed of the chips in their Azusa prototype,
but indicated that the clock speed was well under the expected
800-MHz threshold.
"As we got closer to product time, the task of fixing and validating
the silicon ... pushed us out a quarter," said Paul Otellini,
executive vice president and general manager of the Intel
architecture group, last month in an earnings-related conference
call with analysts. "We learned a lot in the process."
The demonstrations will also be repeated at next week's Intel
Developer Forum, where Intel will have an uninterrupted chance to
expound on the direction of its own chips.
On Tuesday, rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. announced plans to try and win developers to its 64-bit processor, Hammer, through a free software simulation that AMD in Sunnyvale,
Calif., will distribute at the end of September, as well as a
complementary website (http://www.x86-64.org).
Intel, NEC, and SGI all showed a basic Linux kernel running on top
of the Itanium chip. Intel paired two two-way Itanium systems
together, streaming some basic MP3 files off of a combination of
four VA Linux 1000 and four VA Linux 2230 load-balancing boxes.
SGI also showed six two-way Itanium based systems, arranged in
a cluster, running an OpenGL-enabled Linux application tracking
the gravitational pull and physical effects of the collision of a binary
star, using double-precision floating-point mathematics to calculate
the effects, a company spokesman said.
NEC showed perhaps the most polished use of an Itanium system,
combining four CPU cells across a crossbar switch. Each cell
contained four Itanium CPUs.
The demonstration calculated a Mandelbrot set derivation using 15
CPUs. The other CPU was also used to demonstrate the
Mandelbrot calculation, for comparison's sake. NEC used a Linux
2.4.0 kernel, distributed by TurboLinux Inc., using additional
patches for the Itanium and Azusa chip set. The Asuza box will
allow a maximum of 128 Gbytes of memory and 128 PCI slots, the
company said.
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