 Itanium 2 processor | |
| Produced | From mid-2001 to present |
|---|---|
| Common manufacturer(s) |
|
| Max.CPUclock rate | 733 MHz to 2.53 GHz |
| FSB speeds | 300 MHz to 667 MHz |
| Instruction set | Itanium |
| Number of cores | 1, 2, 4 or 8 |
Itanium (/aɪˈteɪniəm/eye-TAY-nee-əm) is a type ofIntelmicroprocessor with64-bit chip architecture (not related to the by now mainstream 64-bitCPUs made by Intel and others). Itanium processors are sometimes used today forservers. Itanium processors were originally designed byHP and Intel with Intel making producing them, and several manufacturers of systems used them; nowhere as many systems used as originally hoped for. HP still supports systems using these chips.
Intel officially announced the end of life and product discontinuance of the Itanium CPU family on January 30, 2019.[1]
When first released in 2001, Itanium's speed was disappointing compared to other processor types.[2][3] Using existingx86 applications andoperating systems was especially bad, with one test in 2001 showing that it was as fast as a 100 MHz Pentium (1.1 GHz Pentiums were on the market at that time).[4] Itanium did not have success compared toIA-32 orRISC, and was even worse whenx86-64 was released, which worked with older x86 applications.
In an article from 2009 about the history of Itanium — "How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry" — journalist John C. Dvorak reported "This continues to be one of the great fiascos [bad situations] of the last 50 years" .[5] Technology writer Ashlee Vance wrote that slowness in speed and release "turned the product into a joke in the chip industry."[6] In an interview,Donald Knuth said "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."[7]
BothRed Hat andMicrosoft said that they would stop allowing Itanium to be used with theiroperating systems.[8][9] However, otherLinux distributions such asGentoo andDebian were still available for Itanium. On March 22, 2011,Oracle said they would no longer support Itanium, but support for their existing products would continue.[10] In October 2013, Oracle said they would release OracleDatabase 12.1.0.1.0 on HP-UX Itanium 11.31 by early 2014.[11]
A past Intel company official said that Itanium had becomeprofitable (Able to make a lot of money) for Intel in late 2009.[12] In 2009 and later, Itanium was mostly used on servers by HP, which made 95% of Itanium servers,[6] so the primary operating system for Itanium was HP-UX. On March 22, 2011, Intel said they will keep supporting Itanium entirely with many new Itanium chips being created and on-time.[13]
Although Itanium did do well with high-end computing, Intel wanted it to have more usage compared to the originalx86 architecture.[14]
AMD decided on an easier idea, creatingx86-64, a 64-bit addition to the x86 architecture, which Microsoft soon supported inMicrosoft Windows, so Intel had to include the same type of 64-bit addition in Intel's x86 processors.[15] x86-64 can use existing 32-bit applications at full hardware speed, but has 64-bit memory addressing and other additions to new applications.[6] This architecture has now become the most used 64-bit architecture in thedesktop andlaptop market, with the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture powering many mobile devices, used in today'siPhones,iPads,iPod Touches, and now manyAndroid phones and tablets such as theNexus 6P andNexus 9. Ssome Itanium-based workstations were introduced by companies such asSGI, but they are no longer available. Because AMD made the first x86-64 chip, the architecture is commonly referred to as "amd64" inside of operating systems.
In 1989, HP thoughtReduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) architectures were stuck at one instruction per cycle. HP researchers tried to create a new type of processor architecture, later called Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC), that allows the processor to use manyinstructions in each clock cycle. EPIC uses a form ofvery long instruction word architecture, in which 1 instruction word had many instructions. With EPIC, thecompiler checks which instructions can be used at the same time, so the processor can run the instructions without needing complicated methods to see which instructions to use at the same time.[18] The idea is to allow better inspection of the code at the time of compile to check for additional opportunities for multiple executions at once, and to simplify processor design and save electricity by removing the need for runtime scheduling instructions.
HP thought that it was not good for individual enterprise system companies like HP to makeproprietary processors, so HP worked with Intel in 1994 to create the IA-64 architecture, made with EPIC's ideas. Intel wanted to make a large effort in creating IA-64 in the expectation that the resulting processor would be used by most enterprise systems. HP and Intel had a large design effort to make the first Itanium product, Merced, in 1998.[18]
During creation, Intel, HP, and other industry analysts thought that IA-64 would be very popular in servers, workstations, and desktops, and one day replace RISC and Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) architectures for multi-purpose applications.[2][3]Compaq andSilicon Graphics stopped working on their Alpha andMIPS architectures to move to the Itanium architecture.[19]
Many groups created operating systems for Itanium, includingMicrosoft Windows,OpenVMS,Linux, andUNIX types such as HP-UX,Solaris,[20][21][22] Tru64 UNIX,[19] and Monterey/64[23] (the last three were never finished). By 1997, many found that the Itanium architecture and the compiler were more difficult to use than they thought.[24] Technology issues such as the very hightransistor counts needed for the large instruction words and the large caches. There were also problems with the project, as the two parts of the team used different methods and had slightly different priorities.[source?] Because Merced was the first EPIC processor, its creation had more problems than the team had thought. In addition, the EPIC concept requires different compiler abilities that had never been created before, so more research was needed.[source?]
Intel announced the name of the processor,Itanium, on October 4, 1999.[25] In only a few hours, the nameItanic had been used as a joke, (a reference toTitanic, the "unsinkable" ship that sank in 1912 ("Itanium + Titanic = Itanic")).[26] "Itanic" has also been used byThe Register,[27] and others,[28][29][30] to say the multi-billion-dollar investment in Itanium, and the early demand with it, would mean nothing because they thought Itanium was going to fail.
 Itanium processor | |
| Produced | From June 2001 to June 2002 |
|---|---|
| Common manufacturer(s) |
|
| Max.CPUclock rate | 733 MHz to 800 MHz |
| FSB speeds | 266 MT/s |
| Instruction set | Itanium |
| Number of cores | 1 |
| L2 cache | 96 KB |
| L3 cache | 2 or 4 MB |
| Socket(s) |
|
| Core name(s) |
|
By the time Itanium was released in June 2001, its performance was not superior to competing RISC and CISC processors.[31] Itanium competed with low-power systems (primarily 4-CPU and small systems) with servers based onx86 processors, and with high-power such as withIBM's POWER architecture andSun Microsystems' SPARC architecture. Intel shifted Itanium to working with the high-power business and HPC computing, trying to copy x86's successful market (i.e., 1 architecture, PA-RISC many system vendors). The success of the 1st processor version was only with replacing in HP systems, Alpha in Compaq systems andMIPS inSGI systems, but IBM also made a supercomputer based on this architecture.[32] POWER and SPARC were strong, and the x86 architecture grew more into the enterprise space, because of easier scaling and very large install base.
Only a few thousand systems using the 1st Itanium processor,Merced, were sold, because of poorer performance, high cost and less Itanium-made software.[33] Intel saw that Itanium required more native software to work well, so Intel made thousands of systems for independent software vendors to help them make Itanium software. HP and Intel brought the 2nd Itanium processor, Itanium 2, to market a year later.
Itanium 2 processor | |
| Produced | From 2002 to 2010 |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Intel |
| Common manufacturer(s) |
|
| Max.CPUclock rate | 900 MHz to 2.53 GHz |
| Instruction set | Itanium |
| Number of cores | 1, 2, 4 or 8 |
| L2 cache | 256 KB on Itanium2 256 KB (D) + 1 MB(I) or 512 KB (I) on (Itanium2 9x00 series) |
| L3 cache | 1.5-32 MB |
| Socket(s) |
|
| Core name(s) |
|
TheItanium 2 processor was released in 2002, for enterprise servers and not all of high-power computing. The 1st version of Itanium 2, code-namedMcKinley, was created by HP and Intel. It fixed many of the problems of the 1st Itanium processor, which were mostly caused by a bad memorysubsystem.McKinley had 221 milliontransistors (25 million of them were for logic), and was 19.5 mm by 21.6 mm (421 mm2) and was created with a 180 nm design process, and a CMOS process with 6 layers ofaluminium.[34]
In 2003,AMD released the Opteron, which implemented the firstx86-64 architecture (called AMD64 at the time). Opteron was much more successful because it was an easy upgrade fromx86. Intel implemented x86-64 in itsXeon processors in 2004.[19]
Intel released a new Itanium 2 processor, code-namedMadison, in 2003. Madison used a 130 nm process and was the foundation of all new Itanium processors until June 2006.
In March 2005, Intel announced that it was working on a new Itanium processor, code-namedTukwila, to be released in 2007. Tukwila would have 4processor cores and would replace the Itanium bus with a new Common System Interface, which would also be used by a new Xeon processor.[35]Later in that year, Intel changed Tukwila's release date to late 2008.[36]
In November 2005, the largest Itanium server makers worked with Intel and many software vendors to create the Itanium Solutions Alliance, to promote the architecture and speed up softwareporting.[37] The Alliance said that its members would invest $10 billion in Itanium solutions by the end of the decade.[38]
In 2006, Intel deliveredMontecito (marketed as theItanium 2 9000 series), a 2-core processor that had approximately 2x performance and 20% less energy usage.[39]
Intel released theItanium 2 9100 series, codenamedMontvale, in November 2007.[40] In May 2009, the release for Tukwila, Montvale's successor, was changed again, with release toOEMs planned for the first quarter of 2010.[41]
TheItanium 9300 series processor, code-namedTukwila, was released on February 8, 2010, with greater performance and memory.[42]
Tukwila uses a 65 nm process, has between two and four cores, up to 24 MB CPU cache,Hyper-Threading technology and new memory controllers. It also hasdouble-device data correction, which helps to fix memory issues. Tukwila also hasIntel QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) to replace the Itanium bus architecture. It has a maximum inner-processorbandwidth of 96 GB/s and a maximum memory bandwidth of 34 GB/s. With QuickPath, the processor has built-in memory controllers, which control the memory usingQPI interfaces to communicate with other processors and I/O hubs. QuickPath is also used with Intel processors using theNehalem architecture, so that Tukwila and Nehalem might be able to use the same chipsets.[43] Tukwila incorporates four memory controllers, each of which supports multipleDDR3DIMMs via a separate memory controller.[44]
 | This article needs to beupdated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(March 2014) |
The Itanium 9500 series processor, code-namedPoulson, is the follow-on processor to Tukwila and was released on November 8, 2012.[45] Intel says it skips the45 nm process technology and uses the32 nm process technology instead; it features 8 cores, has a 12-wide issue architecture, multi-threading additions, and new instructions for parallelism, including virtualization.[43][46][47] The Poulson L3 cache size is 32 MB. L2 cache size is 6 MB, 512 I KB, 256 D KB per core.[48] Poulson's size is 544 mm², less than Tukwila's size (698.75 mm²).[49][50]
In comparison with itsXeon server processors, Itanium has never been a large product for Intel. Intel does not release production numbers. One industry analyst estimated that the production rate was 200,000 processors per year in 2007.[51]
According toGartner, in 2008, HP had 95% of Itanium sales.[6] HP's Itanium system sales were at $4.4 Billion at the end of 2008, and $3.5 Billion by the end of 2009,[52] compared to a 35% decline in UNIX system revenue for Sun and an 11% drop for IBM, with an x86-64 server revenue increase of 14% during this period.
In December 2012, IDC released a research report stating that Itanium server shipments would remain flat through 2016, with annual shipment of 26,000 systems (a decline of over 50% compared to shipments in 2008).[53]
| Company | Latest product | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| name | from | to | name | CPUs |
| Compaq | 2001 | 2001 | ProLiant 590 | 1–4 |
| IBM | 2001 | 2005 | x455 | 1–16 |
| Dell | 2001 | 2005 | PowerEdge 7250 | 1–4 |
| Hitachi | 2001 | 2008 | BladeSymphony 1000 | 1–8 |
| Unisys | 2002 | 2009 | ES7000/one | 1–32 |
| SGI | 2001 | 2011 | Altix 4000 | 1–2048 |
| Fujitsu | 2005 | 2011 | PRIMEQUEST | 1–32 |
| HP | 2001 | now | Integrity | 1–256 |
| Bull | 2002 | now | NovaScale 9410 | 1–32 |
| NEC | 2002 | now | nx7700i | 1–256 |
| Inspur | 2010 | now | TS10000 | 2-1024 |
| Huawei | 2012 | now | ???? | ???? |
As of 2015[update], only a few providers have Itanium systems, such asHP,Bull,NEC,Inspur andHuawei.Intel offers a chassis that can be used bysystem integrators to build Itanium systems.[54] HP sold 7,200 systems in the first quarter of 2006.[55] Most Itanium systems sold areenterprise servers and machines for large-scale technical computing, with each system costing aboutUS $200,000. A typical system uses eight or more Itanium processors.
The Itanium bus communicates with the rest of the system. Enterprise server makers differentiate their systems by making their own chipsets that interface the processor to memory, interconnections, and peripheral controllers. The chipset is the heart of the system-level architecture for each system design. Creation of a chipset costs tens of millions of dollars and represents a major commitment to the use of the Itanium. IBM created a chipset in 2003, and Intel in 2002, but neither of them developed chipsets to support technologies such asDDR2 orPCI Express.[56] Chipsets for Itanium supporting such technologies were manufactured by HP,Fujitsu,SGI,NEC, andHitachi.
The "Tukwila" Itanium processor model had been designed to share a common chipset with the Intel Xeon processor EX (Intel's Xeon processor designed for four processor and larger servers). The goal is to streamline system development and reduce costs for server OEMs, many of whom develop both Itanium- and Xeon-based servers. However, in 2013, this goal was pushed back to "evaluated for future implementation opportunities".[57]
Itanium is or was supported (i.e. Windows version can no longer be bought) by the followingoperating systems:
Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 would be the last version of Windows Server to support the Itanium (support started with XP), and that it would also discontinue development of the Itanium versions ofVisual Studio andSQL Server.[8] Likewise,Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (first released in March 2007) was the last Itanium edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux[9]
In late September 2012, NEC announced a return from IA-64 to the previous NOAH line of proprietary mainframe processors, now produced in a quad-core variant on 40 nm, called NOAH-6.[73]
To allow more software to run on the Itanium, Intel supported the development of compilers optimized for the platform, especially its own suite of compilers.[74][75] Starting in November 2010, with the introduction of new product suites, the Intel Itanium Compilers were no longer bundled with the Intel x86 compilers in a single product. Intel offers Itanium tools and Intel x86 tools, including compilers, independently in different product bundles.GCC,[76][77]Open64 andMicrosoft Visual Studio 2005 (and later)[78] are also able to producemachine code for Itanium. According to the Itanium Solutions Alliance over 13,000 applications were available for Itanium-based systems in early 2008,[79] though Sun has contested Itanium application counts in the past.[80] The ISA also supportedGelato, an Itanium HPC user group and developer community that ported and supportedopen-source software for Itanium.[81]
Itanium is aimed at theenterprise server andhigh-performance computing (HPC) markets. Other enterprise- and HPC-focused processor lines includeOracle Corporation'sSPARC M7,Fujitsu's SPARC64 X+ andIBM'sPOWER8. Measured by quantity sold, Itanium's most serious competition comes fromx86-64 processors includingIntel's ownXeon line andAMD'sOpteron line. Since 2009, most servers were being shipped with x86-64 processors.[52]
In 2005, Itanium systems accounted for about 14% of HPC systems revenue, but the percentage declined as the industry shifts to x86-64 clusters for this application.[82]
An October 2008 paper by Gartner, on the Tukwila processor stated that "...the future roadmap for Itanium looks as strong as that of any RISC peer like Power or SPARC."[83]
An Itanium-based computer first appeared on the list of theTOP500supercomputers in November 2001.[32] The best position ever achieved by anItanium 2 based system in the list was #2, achieved in June 2004, whenThunder entered the list with anRmax of 19.94Teraflops. In November 2004,Columbia entered the list at #2 with 51.8 Teraflops, and there was at least one Itanium-based computer in the top 10 from then until June 2007. The peak number of Itanium-based machines on the list occurred in the November 2004 list, at 84 systems (16.8%); by June 2012, this had dropped to one system (0.2%),[84] and no Itanium system remained on the list in November 2012.
The Itanium processors show a progression in capability. Merced was a proof of concept. McKinley dramatically improved the memory hierarchy and allowed Itanium to become reasonably competitive. Madison, with the shift to a 130 nm process, allowed for enough cache space to overcome the major performance bottlenecks. Montecito, with a 90 nm process, allowed for a dual-core implementation and a major improvement in performance per watt. Montvale added three new features: core-level lockstep, demand-based switching and front-side bus frequency of up to 667 MHz.
| Codename | process | Released | Clock | L2Cache/ core | L3Cache/ processor | Bus | dies/ device | cores/ die | watts/ device | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Itanium | ||||||||||
| Merced | 180 nm | 2001-06 | 733 MHz | 96 KB | none | 266 MHz | 1 | 1 | 116 | 2 MB off-die L3 cache |
| 800 MHz | 130 | 4 MB off-die L3 cache | ||||||||
| Itanium 2 | ||||||||||
| McKinley | 180 nm | 2002-07-08 | 900 MHz | 256 KB | 1.5 MB | 400 MHz | 1 | 1 | 130 | HW branchlong |
| 1 GHz | 3 MB | 130 | ||||||||
| Madison | 130 nm | 2003-06-30 | 1.3 GHz | 3 MB | 130 | |||||
| 1.4 GHz | 4 MB | 130 | ||||||||
| 1.5 GHz | 6 MB | 130 | ||||||||
| 2003-09-08 | 1.4 GHz | 1.5 MB | 130 | |||||||
| 2004-04 | 1.4 GHz | 3 MB | 130 | |||||||
| 1.6 GHz | ||||||||||
| Deerfield | September 8, 2003 | 1.0 GHz | 1.5 MB | 62 | Low voltage | |||||
| Hondo[85] | 2004-Q1 | 1.1 GHz | 4 MB | 400 MHz | 2 | 1 | 260 | 32 MB L4 | ||
| Fanwood | 2004-11-08 | 1.6 GHz | 3 MB | 533 MHz | 1 | 1 | 130 | |||
| 1.3 GHz | 400 MHz | 62? | Low voltage | |||||||
| Madison | November 8, 2004 | 1.6 GHz | 9 MB | 400 MHz | 130 | |||||
| 2005-07-05 | 1.67 GHz | 6 MB | 667 MHz | 130 | ||||||
| 2005-07-18 | 1.67 GHz | 9 MB | 667 MHz | 130 | ||||||
| Itanium 2 9000 series | ||||||||||
| Montecito | 90 nm | 2006-07-18 | 1.4 GHz | 256 KB (D)+ 1 MB (I) | 6–24 MB | 400 MHz | 1 | 2 | 104 | Virtualization, Multithread, no HW IA-32 |
| 1.6 GHz | 533 MHz | |||||||||
| Itanium 2 9100 series | ||||||||||
| Montvale | 90 nm | October 31, 2007 | 1.42–1.66 GHz | 256 KB (D)+ 1 MB (I) | 8–24 MB | 400–667 MHz | 1 | 1–2 | 75–104 | Core-level lockstep, demand-based switching |
| Itanium 9300 series | ||||||||||
| Tukwila | 65 nm | February 8, 2010 | 1.33–1.73 GHz | 256 KB (D)+ 512 KB (I) | 10–24 MB | QPI with a speed of 4.8GT/s | 1 | 2–4 | 130–185 | A new point-to-point processor interconnect, theQPI, replacing theFSB.Turbo Boost |
| Itanium 9500 series | ||||||||||
| Poulson | 32 nm | 2012-11-08[86] | 1.73–2.53 GHz | 256 KB (D)+ 512 KB (I) | 20–32 MB | QPI with a speed of 6.4GT/s | 1 | 4–8 | 130–170 | Doubled issue width (from 6 to 12 instructions per cycle), Instruction Replay technology, Dual-domain hyperthreading[87][88][89] |
| Codename | process | Released | Clock | L2 Cache/ core | L3 Cache/ processor | Bus | dies/ device | cores/ die | watts/ device | Comments |
During the HP vs. Oracle support lawsuit, court documents unsealed bySanta Clara County Court judge revealed in 2008, Hewlett-Packard had paid Intel Corp. around $440 million to keep producing and updating Itanium microprocessors from 2009 to 2014. In 2010, the two companies signed another $250 million deal, which obliged Intel to continue making Itanium central processing units for HP's machines until 2017. Under the terms of the agreements, HP has to pay for chips it gets from Intel, while Intel launches Tukwila, Poulson, Kittson and Kittson+ chips in a bid to gradually boost performance of the platform.[90][91]
Kittson is planned to follow Poulson in 2015.[92] Kittson, like Poulson, will be manufactured using Intel's 32 nm process. Few other details are known beyond the existence of the codename and the binary and socket compatibility with Poulson and Tukwila, though moving to a common socket with x86Xeon "will be evaluated for future implementation opportunities" after Kittson.[93]
Once touted by Intel as a replacement for the x86 product line, expectations for Itanium have been throttled well back.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)The Gentoo/IA-64 Project works to keep Gentoo the most up to date and fastest IA-64 distribution available.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the last version of Windows Server to support the Intel Itanium architecture," [...] "SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 are also the last versions to support Itanium.
