Do you honestly think that people buy Itaniums for the clock frequency, rather than performance? If not, then why are you making an issue out of missing frequency goals?
Well , don't fall entirely for Paul's arguments.
The HPC market responded enthusiastically to IPF back in 2002-2004 , SGI was rocking with Altix , Intel was selling thousands of its Tiger boxes and so on.
The IPF systems on Top 500 list were doubling each 6 months , massive wins were announced each month.
I remember how Paul was saying that IPF will dominate Top 500 and so on.
Everything fell apart in late 2004.Why ? Because of lack of progress with IPF's top frequency.Unlike commercial apps , in HPC the IPF cores were kept busy , they could do 4 DP Flops per cycle and could scale to thousands of CPUs.
So , the performance per clock was there.Why did Itanium go from the darling of HPC world to extinction in 2 years ?
Because it lacks clocks , the top frequency in 2008 is the same as in 2004.
At the same time , x86 greatly improved , going from 2DP Flops and 2GHz to 4DP Flops and 3.2GHz while doubling the amount of cores.
Had Intel delivered on its promises , SGI wouldn't have went Chapter 11 , the HPC market wouldn't have been lost and it would have made and even bigger splash in the commercial market ( unlike being a HP thing as it is now ).
You can go away with decent performance when you are SUN or IBM , huge user bases , locked in , but not when you are the new kid on the block.IPF was the new kid in the server world.
HP could go away with that , their existing Unix user base had few options.
What about the rest of IPF vendors ? They didn't have a huge user base so they could shove IPF down their throats.They had to win on technical merits.And when the performance isn't there vs. other RISCs/x86, how the hell are you supposed to make any progress ?
Paul constantly hails IPF gaining share in Windows/Linux server market.That's missing the whole picture : unlike Unix where you can be tied to apps you won't find in the x86 world , going Windows/Linux you're basically up on a plate for x86 consolidation.
Whatever app people are using on Windows/Linux on IPF is found in the x86 world.So why did people buy IPF systems for that ?
Simple : RAS obviously since the performance is inferior.
What will happen when x86 gets to the same level of RAS with vastly higher performance ( say hello to Nehalem EX/Shanghai )?
They will flock back to cheaper , better performing x86 systems.
SGI isn't designing the future Altix to be Nehalem EX compatible just for the fun of it.
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