Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[pgerassi]

IPF gets its big SPECint_base2006 scores from its huge caches. Without them, it does poorly. And while base maybe ok for Xeon, peak is a better handle on non SPEC special compilers.

BTW SPECint_2006 scores for the top three are 17.0, 14.7 and 11.1 for a 18MB L2 Itanium 2 9140M, a 8MB L2 Xeon E5310 and a 2MB L2/2MB L3 Opteron 2344HE. Of course current flagships of each are 17.0 for Itanium 9140M (1.66GHz/18MB), 30.3 for Xeon X5470 (3.33GHz/12MB) and 16.2 for Opteron 2360SE (2.5GHz/4.5MB). The Xeon L7345 (1.86GHz/8MB) gets 17.0 as well. So 12% faster clock equals 1.5 times the cache. Of course most of the gains in each over the other is how well they do on the small footprint 162.libquantum. Pull out that test and they are much closer together. And the other thing is that relatively few AMD64 class CPUs are tested at the lower clock rates while Itanium maxes out at 1.66GHz.

Besides clock doesn't matter as much when you switch between architectures. If you want performance per clock, the current GPUs flattens EPIC to a smear. 1.2Tflops at 750MHz beats 13.3Gflops at 1.66GHz. Some would argue that performance per die area is a better look at an architecture. There the IPF falls down too. The real reason IPF is 1 or 2 prcoess generations back is that it needs those large caches to do well and the resulting huge dies need mature processes to have decent yields. Besides its revenue stream can't afford process development. Not true of AMD64 CPUs both Opteron and Xeon.

The 2 socket blades require a blade rack plus the OEM markup on the CPUs themselves is over 100% (over double the supply price) Thus 2S rack costs $13K with 4GB of memory and has less than $1K of CPUs in it (2 gets $14K with $2K of CPUs) for about 7.5% (14% with 2) (Thats a 9010 1.6GHz/3MB L2):

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q=Itanium+2+server+1.6GHz&cid=9113511524447458734#ps-tech-specs

Fairly far from your 40% estimate. And that is before adding HDs, comm boards, service and bundled software. With the servers, a 4S one goes for $42K (street price) with 4 9010s installed with 8GB memory and 73GB HD with the CPUs being less than $4K of that (HP charges $12K for 4 9010 upgrades at list). That is under 10%.

Frankly at this level of number quality of yours, no wonder your calculations are so far off. You look like you think HP pays list prices to Intel for CPUs. Far from the truth.