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OldHand2018

Does anyone else have real-world Itanium experience? We've got a couple 5+ year old HP Integrity servers running OpenVMS on Itanium at work that we use to batch process large ASCII vendor files in an ETL process written in C. They certainly don't embarrass themselves. We'll be connecting them to a new Pure Storage SAN in a few months and the IT guys are really excited to see what happens to performance.

I take the same exact C code, compile it with Visual Studio, and then run the same ASCII files locally on my 7th-gen 4c/8t i7 desktop and am not seeing any improvement. That's about the best I can do as far as benchmarking goes.

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I used Itanium from 2003-2006 for scientific computing on a big cluster. For that purpose it was much faster than Intel's Xeons of similar vintage. It was also significantly faster than the MIPS and POWER systems we had. Caveats:

- The simulation suite that I used most heavily was developed in-house at the same lab that bought the hardware. It was profiled and tuned specifically for our hardware. The development team was a real software development team with experience writing parallel simulation code since the early 1990s. It wasn't just a bunch of PhD students trying to shove new features into the software to finish their theses.

- There was also close cooperation between the lab, the system vendor (HP), and Intel.

- Other software (like all the packages shipped with RHEL for Itanium) didn't seem particularly fast.

- God help you if you needed to run software that was available only as binary for x86. The x86 emulation was not fast at all.

It was great for numerical code that had been specifically tuned for it. It was pretty good for numerical code that had been tuned for other contemporary machines. Otherwise I didn't see particularly good performance from it. I don't know if it really was a design that was only good for HPC or if (e.g.) it also would have been good for Java/databases, given sufficient software investments.

Maybe it would have been competitive against AMD64, even considering the difficulty of architecture-switching, if it had not been so expensive. But I'm not sure Intel had wiggle room to price Itanium to pressure AMD64 even if they had wanted to; Itaniums were quite big, complicated chips.

Numerical code is usually the best case for VLIW machines. It is not surprising that Itanium did well there.

At my previous job we used itanium servers for the secure64 dns platform[1]. It performed well, the logic behind itanium is security not performance (according to secure64) but performance was never an issue. I do know the hardware support for rsa did give nice performance for dnssec signing.

[1] https://secure64.com/dns-products/secure64-platforms/secure-...

The logic behind Itanium was mostly to have a 64-bit architecture that was specific to Intel without any cross-licensing to other vendors like AMD. And which would also replace proprietary RISC flavors like PA-RISC.

It did also have a fair bit of security acceleration built-in. As I recall, one of the principals behind Secure64 was one of the HP leads associated with the original IA64 announcement. Secure64 pushed Itanium for security applications when it was becoming clear that it was never going to be a mainstream 64-bit architecture.

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