Tukzila is no new news
"1) all three mentioned are still signed up to the Itanium Alliance so they would still seem interested.
==> SGI went bankrupt after Rick Belluzzo came over from HP and forced them to move from MIPs to Itanium. Now Rackable bought SGI and is only interested in the current Itanium chip.
===> Unisys is not interesting in supporting Tukwila as the volumes are too low to justify R&D or even sales.
How many companies will be making Power7 servers this year?
===>Groupe Bull and Hitachi
One. And no dates yet on which Power7 servers when, but probably initially only the low-end ones where IBM can get away with putting in Power7 chips with duff cores that failed the process. So, no real octo-core Power7 with all cores working until when, October?
====> Will you admit you are wrong on Monday?
"2) Why only four cores when Nehalem and POWER7 are both 8 cores." Because the cores are better, maybe?
==>Because 65nm does not allow enough space four 4 cores
"3) Why less than 2GHz when Nehalem is 3+ and POWER7 is 4+" Oh dear, I can't believe you're using the old frequency angle!
===> Well no one is saying EPIC architecture is the future and everything I have seen says Nehalem will replace Itanium
"4) Why announce a chip and not announce actual systems, what is the point?" Intel make the CPU, it is the vendors such as hp that make the servers. Duh!
===> Not sure why its meaningful for customers and I doubt there will be any new news. The chip was supposed to be out in 2006 to compete with Power6.
"5) Wasn't tukwila announced two years ago?" Not sure on the exact date but probably.
==> yes announced as the first 2 billion resistor chip
However, it was decided to include DDR3 in the spec, which meant the memory controllers had to be redesigned.
==>There had to be more than DDR3 otherwise why not do a Tukwila+
The rest of the design, though tweaked, would seem to have been in place for a while, which means there are likely to be better yields and less bugs than IBM's rushed Power7, which IBM have rushed out the door to meet the Tukzilla launch date.
==> Why would Power7 be rushed to meet a Tukzilla launch date when it was designed to compete with Power6 and the Tukzilla systems wont be available till May? Maybe Power7 had such good yields the announce was moved in three months...that does happen for some chips.
"6) Why is HP requiring a fork lift upgrade to Tukwila systems"
====> Well the HP smooth upgrade path (you only get to keep the rack) will not be true any more
"7) Why is Tukwila finally getting to 65nm when all other chips are 45nm or better?" Agreed, the 65nm bit is a problem, but not a big one. The design has been held back to add the new memory controllers for DDR3. As it was originally designed at 65nm, it made sense to take the least disruptive path and stay there. The problem for IBM is that Intel do this a lot - get a chip working at one size die, then rapidly shrink the die to reduce power draw and ramp both performance and density. Just look at the Xeon roadmap. Intel has a 45nm process already and soon a proven 25nm process, which bodes well for Itanium's future. And, to go back to your question about octo-cores, when Itanium hits 32nm or 25nm it can use the proven Nehalem processes to go hex- and octo-core. And what do we have on the Power roadmap after 45nm Power7? Nothing but "future" - no indication of a 25nm Power8.
====> Let's not confuse Xeon with Itanium. Tukwila is 65nm and Poulson while Intel says it plans for it to be 32nm does not have a date....and that is tock of Tukwilas tick
"8) Why is there no core performance increase when software costs are so high and priced per core?" You want to complain about increased core counts increasing licence costs when Power7 is going octo-core!?!? So Tukzilla's clock is going up but you claim there will be no per core gain? What, are you saying clock makes no difference, which kinda blows a big hole in your argument above? So, the core will be faster, and it will have greater bandwidth to the faster DDR3 memory, wanna hand with the obvious conclusion? It will perform better per core than the current Itaniums with the same apps.
====> Everything I read about Tukwila says "twice the performance" nothing says "more than twice the performance or four times the performance" and since it has twice the cores then the core performance is the same.
"9) How are the Linux sales on Itanium? I hear they are so bad RedHat has dropped support." No idea. But we do have a commitment from RedHat to continue current support of RHEL5 on Itanium. What will harm RedHat's chances on Itanium is they have decided not to support KVM (their virtualisation tool) on Itanium. But, we still have Integrity Virtual Machines, or Xen for if we need another way to virtualise Linux on Integrity.
====> So unless HP buys RedHat RHEL6 will not be supported on Itanium. So it is just HP-UX, VMS, Non-Stop and some Windows.
"10) Will Tukwila finally have hardware virtualization? Itanium seems to be the only processor besides SPARC64 to not provide at least some hardware virtualization." Bit confused hear as Integrity has had a better partitionig options than Power since 2001. With Integrity Virtual Machines, soft partitioning and hard partitioning, PRM, WLM and GWLM, all from hp and fully supported, what is the need for "hardware" virtualisation? Cough*features-sell*cough.
=======> Partitioning is not virtualization. IVM is a high overhead HP-UX host and is more for test and development. I figured Tukwila would have hardware virtualization like Power or Xeon...it it doesn't then Itanium has a real problem.
"11) I hear Oracle is going to increase the core price to .75 just like SPARC or higher what is the factor?" I hear Jordan is going to get bigger boobs. Unless it happens it's just talk, or FUD in your case. And seeing as Larry has been very carefully targetting IBM in his attacks, not hp (seeing as the majority of his new Oracle installs go onto hp servers),
====> As pointed out by Pony Tail, Oracle's core factor table has Tukwila at 1 license per core which is up from .5. Who is Jordan?
"12) Is HP going to have a BI offering now that Exadata was canceled and Neoview is not selling?" I have no idea on Neoview sales but I bet they're at least as good (or as bad) as Exadata. And didn't hp and Microsoft recently announce a joint project on BI and CRM?
=====> Never heard of SQL Server being used for BI
"13) Besides having twice the cores in the same footprint what is the value of Tukwila? The same core and software license performance." Dear, you're repeating yourself. Please see the answers to point 8 above.
====> I guess I am just shocked at how poor Itanium has done so poorly vs. the expectations.
"With twice as many cores, Tukwila will allow HP to put the same compute capacity into a system half the size, Bartlett said. For example, a fully loaded SuperDome with 64 processors will occupy one server cabinet with Tukwila, whereas today it uses two." VP HP.
===> I hope they come out with a better value proposition than just two to four cores.
"14) Oracle still does not have support for the eBiz suite applications on Itanium..will that ever change?" No idea, ask Larry. But isn't the number one platform for new eBiz installs (along with ALL Oracle software offerings) hp, namely ProLiant? If ProLiant is the top seller for eBiz then I can't see hp being too worried
====> Confusing Xeon and Itanium again. eBiz will never be supported on Itanium and is fully supported on all Power systems.
"15) I hear HP is giving away free upgrades to Tukwila, but I don't see the point since applications will not get any more performance." LOL! "I hear a competitior is giving away free upgrades, which means customers can cash in old servers and get new ones which consume less power and need less rackspace AND perform better" - yeah, I can see why that would be a problem for you!
====> Annyong-hi kashipshio....or for you Cheers.....and see you Monday
/SP&L, new object of amusement though.