What About Intel?
Although the Pentium 4 was also one of Intel's best-selling CPUs, its NetBurst architecture represented the rare occasion when the company had a second-place technology. Intel lost mind share and market share to AMD's superior Athlon CPUs. However, with the introduction of the Pentium M from Intel's Haifa design center and subsequent Core micro-architecture, Intel re-established its position as the CPU technology leader. Perhaps more impressive is that Core is itself an evolutionary branch from the P6 "Pentium Pro" architecture that dates back to 1995.
From a design standpoint, Intel has not kept all of its assets in one platform. Intel is one of the few companies with two profitable high-performance CPU architectures. And by that, I'm talking about Itanium. After two decades of work and a decade of commercial availability, the Itanium investment is actually paying off for Intel. The company is making money from its investment now. As impressive as Intel's Haifa design center was in bringing the P6 architecture into the modern world, many of the core engineers from the P6 were transferred to the Itanium team. Combined with the HP PA-RISC engineers, the Itanium project has some of the best CPU engineers in the world working on it.
Even before the launch of Itanium, Intel outlined the future of x86 in a PowerPoint presentation: higher frequencies via new process technologies, micro-architecture enhancements, CPU and platform enhancements, and higher-performance buses. This meant things such as larger caches, faster bus frequencies with more bandwidth, and multiple cores--all things we're seeing with Nehalem and it's use of large shared L3 caches, QPI, and scalable core counts. The company saw this roadmap more than 20 years ago, and knew that it would ultimately reach a limit. Today’s CPUs have already reached higher heat density than a nuclear reactor, and maintaining Moore’s Law will be a considerable challenge once five nanometer gates are achieved.
The Itanium architecture was conceived two decades ago as insurance against that inevitable day. Unlike current CPUs, which rely on considerable die space for non-computing elements to optimize performance, such as out-of-order schedulers and branch prediction, Itanium was designed with the idea that silicon should be dedicated toward actual computational elements. Instead of trying to schedule things in real-time with only a few CPU clock cycles to make a decision, this type of optimization would be performed ahead of time, in software, during the compilation and development stage, when more time and more complex algorithms could be used. The CPU might then abandon traditional design cues and adopt a very long instruction word (VLIW) design, in which the CPU could be fed a large number of instructions with each clock cycle in order to maintain performance. It was an epic idea. So they called it EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing).
Unfortunately, the compiler technology to pull this off did not even exist when Intel and HP began the project. In fact, it would prove to be a more difficult challenge than originally anticipated, which led to years of lackluster sales and performance. The original Itanium, launched two years behind schedule and after more than a decade of development, was little more than a proof-of-concept. Itanium 2, launched two years behind Intel’s revised schedule, was what brought the project into profitability. Tukwila, "Itanium 3," is now three years late, based on the original time line.
But being late doesn’t mean that it’s terrible. Intel has over 1,000 engineers working on Itanium, and it’s important to distinguish the core design of the VLIW Itanium and the weaknesses of the actual implementation that has led to the perception of Itanium as a massive failure. Dollar-for-dollar, Itanium has never been able to beat Opterons or Xeons. However, these benchmarks don’t capture the reliability features of the architecture, including core-level lockstep, which offers the equivalent of RAID mirroring for CPUs. With lock step, two processor cores can be synchronized to the same clock and asked to perform the same computations and verify the output, or even run comparisons to another CPU socket. HP Integrity NonStop systems employing Itanium boast 99.99999% up-time compared to the 99.999% offered by IBM’s mainframe line. This is the difference between three seconds of down-time per year versus five minutes. For the companies finding that level of reliability important...well, that’s why Itanium is profitable. There’s nothing to stop Intel from producing a lower-end Itanium without these features, other than the lack of a commercial market for it.
I don’t think that Itanium is going to enter the space held by Xeon or Opteron today. The Itanium market is likely to grow over the next decade as more hospitals move toward electronic medical records and digital imaging systems, where the perceived 99.99999% uptime is valuable. With the next version of Itanium supporting QPI, the same interconnect technology used in the current Nehalem-based CPUs, heterogenous systems incorporating both traditional Xeon x86-64 CPUs and Itanium IA-64 CPUs will be possible.
We may never hit the true limit of Moore’s Law within our lifetime. Once you reach 5nm gates, you start to run into issues of electron tunneling. You can’t go any smaller, and therefore have to look at things like quantum computing and stacked chips. VLIW/IA64 will be ready sooner than quantum computing, but stacked chips provide one way to maintain effective CPU cooling with very dense transistors.
The Itanium investment may also pay dividends with future versions of Larrabee. Though Larrabee’s thread-level parallelism is different than Itanium’s VLIW instruction-level parallelism, many of the compiler tools and optimizations can carry over. In fact, Nvidia’s own CUDA compiler is built from the Open64 compiler, an open-source tool originally developed for Itanium development. All in all, Intel has the enviable position of having one of the best mainstream architectures in Core i3/i5/i7, and one of the best mainframe architectures in Itanium.
