Re: Intel to chip away at Itanium prices <- or ... I want my cheap

From: Robert Klute (news_at_klute.us)
Date: 01/29/04 

Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 14:39:20 GMT

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:52:17 +0000, Andrew Harrison SUNUK Consultancy
<Andrew_No.Harrison_No@nospamn.sun.com> wrote:

>Robert Klute wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Jan 2004 18:53:45 +0000, Andrew Harrison SUNUK Consultancy
>> <Andrew_No.Harrison_No@nospamn.sun.com> wrote:
>>
>
>>>The z2000 with a CPU that can compete ish with the IA32
>>>costs ~5K with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.4 GHZ 1.5 MB cache
>>>Itanium II. I say Ish because it isn't a fast processor
>>>compared with IA32 or Opteron except on FP.
>>
>>
>> Let's see the 1.2GHz SunBlade 2000 is ~$7K.
>>
>
>Why introduce the SunBlade 2000 ? We are talking
>about the commodity desktop market not the
>engineering workstation market.

You were comparing the Itanium to commodity desktop systems. It was my
rather clumsy attempt to point out the both Intel and HP have directed
their efforts at the server market and the low end of the server CPU is
the workstation.
>
>But just to humour you, why select the SunBlade
>2000 ? its a dual CPU workstation, neither the
>z2000 or the D530 support dual CPU's hence its
>powere requirements and the SunBlade 2000 is also
>rather more expensive than other SunBlade
>workstations becasue its based on the UltraIII
>rather than the UltraIIIi CPU

The closest the SunBlade, in terms of performance, was the single CPU
2000. In dual CPU mode, it is comparable to the zx6000.

>Dell and Intel from the SPEC site. I used the
>Dell Itanium number because they are the only
>vendor to publish a 1.4 Ghz 1.5 MB cache number.

As I pointed out in a later post, it is not a valid comparison. For
whatever reason, where I could compare a Dell and an HP system running
the same CPU, the Dell ran 11 - 16% slower.

>> SPECint Peak for the 1.5GHz zx6000 is 1315
>> SPECint Base for the 1.0GHz zx6000 is 807
>> SPECint Peak for the 1.2GHz SunBlade 2000 is 722
>
>Not relevant we are not talking about engineering
>workstations and we are also not talking about the
>zx6000 which is rather more expensive than the
>zx2000 which you refered to.

At least the zx2000 and and zx6000 are based on the same chipsets and
basic architecture, which allows for a reasonable basis of comparison.

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