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> It wouldn't surprise me if Itanium actually had pretty compelling SPECint numbers. This was one of the more confusing things about Itanium. It's specificatio
by giantrobot 2y ago
> It wouldn't surprise me if Itanium actually had pretty compelling SPECint numbers.
This was one of the more confusing things about Itanium. It's specifications on paper were really impressive. It had crazy high benchmark results (SPEC, Linpack, etc) compared to similarly clocked competing chips. If real world code behaved like those benchmarks Itanium would have blown other chips out of the water.
I don't know if I've ever seen real-world tests showing the Itanium getting anywhere near the performance of its benchmarks. Intel was also charging a huge premium for the privilege.
- bcrl 2y agoSome of those results were due to the substantially better memory subsystem that itanics had compared to x86 systems of the time.
- hapless 2y agoBy the time this PDF deck dropped, AMD K10 / Opteron was out, and that ship had sailed. By 2004 the only thing Itanium had going for it vs a similarly sized Opteron system was the enormous L3 cache. Real good for SPECfp, I guess.
- bcrl 2y agoContext switches and interrupts were also pretty quick on itanic as well. Modern x86 has so much cruft that it Would Be Nice if those parts could be re-architected, but it's more like to just become more legacy baggage carried on into future CPU generations.