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back to article SGI's ICE, ICE bladey

SGI's dash away from cruel mistress Itanic continued this week in earnest with the delivery of the Xeon-based Altix ICE blade. ICE doesn't stand for Itanium Cills Eams as you might expect but rather Integrated Compute Environment. And so you'll find the Altix ICE 8200 blade integrated with either dual- or four-core Xeon chips …

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  1. Brian Murray

    infiniband

    ... I notice this is creeping in behind the scenes as a critical ingredient in many offerings now.

    The advantages of this backplane have always been obvious, except to those clinging faithfully to their ethernet/FC familiarities. I've always thought it was under-hyped before it really got the chance ot be over-hyped - so it's amusing to see it being quietly adopted despite being unfashionable.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Itanium bashing deeply misses the point

    It seems that the desire to bash the Itanium at every chance is hard to keep in check. However SGI's release of a Pentium based cluster is not such a time. Indeed such Itanium bashing really is getting tiresome.

    The logic seems to be that the bozos at Intel are just too thick to make a good processor, and keep slogging away with the flawed millstone that is the Itanium, whilst having their asses whipped in the marketplace by the really clever guys that make the x86 chips, which just so happen to be um, Intel.

    Underpinning it is a very uneasy bit of reasoning. The x86 is not a happy ISA, you will find no-one who will say that it is in any sense superior to the many RISC, VLIW (or EPIC) ISAs about. It has long been acknowledged that the x86 gets it speed by the sheer force of effort put into it by Intel and AMD. This effort is justified, not on any technical grounds, but by the market's desire for x86 compatibles, mostly to run Windows-XX. No-one believes that the x86 is a better architecture than Itanium. But the market spoke, and Itanium stayed a niche player. And everyone pokes fun at Intel and the Itanium vendors. And SGI as the most visible gets the most. And somehow evolving from this logic is the idea that the Itanium is a technical dud.

    However putting lots of x86 cores on a die does not a super fast processor make. As feature size drops and the propagation delays mount, the Itanium is still likely to draw past and x86, and then move well ahead. The danger is that no-one will care because their Windows box will still be fast enough. But that is the market, not technical. Some of us still want lots more real processing power.

    I have a rather special viewpoint. My organisation bought the first of these new SGI clusters that was shipped. 544 cores. And very nice it is too. We got into the Top-500. We also have an Itanium based Altix. It is a very very nice machine as well. 160 processors ccNuma. I can assure you that there are very good reasons to buy both, and very good reasons why so many Itanium based Altix's are resident in the Top-500. Being based upon a simple Linpack benchmark the Top-500 ratings do not do justice to the advanced supercomputer architectures, the Itanium based machines perform well beyond their apparent rating on real world jobs.

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