It is always refreshing to look back at what the Itanium range was suppose to bring to humanity and the world of computing; the epic project was supposed to generate sales of $37 billion in its third year, by 2001.
So far, Itanium sales have all but failed to live up to the initial expectations of the two main backers, HP and Intel. One can even question whether the project has indeed broken even given that HP & Intel started the development of IA-64 seven years before the first Itanium CPU was released.
The 10th version of Itanium, Tukwila or Itanium 9300, has been released and is born into a world that is very different from when Merced first launched. Apart from PA-RISC and the DEC Alpha Family, the Power architecture, the X86 and the SPARC family are still alive and (more or less) kicking.
The Power7 is likely to be a formidable competitor to the 9300. IBM has just published the SPEC CPU2006 performance for the chip and they are impressive.
The 8-socket, 64-core system which can play with 256 threads at 3.86GHz, resulting in an SPEC2006 int_rate/fp_rate score of 2530 and 2240 respectively (ed: SPEC was the only widespread benchmark we could find at this level).
In comparison, the previous generation Power6 scored only 2155 and 2184 in the two aforementioned benchmarks while sporting 32 dual-core processors (that's four time the number of sockets) and a clock speed of 5GHz.
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