Processor Whispers: About Intrinsity and Integrity

By Andreas Stiller

Intel plans to shake up the market for small mobile devices with the new Atom offspring Moorestown, but some of Intel’s partners have their own plans. HP does this and that, buys Palm and rolls out the first Itanium Tukwila systems.

Apple still hasn’t released any official statement, but reputable sources, like the Microprocessor Report and the New York Times, confirm that Apple has bought the small Texan technology company Intrinsity – and on Intrinsity co-founder Jim Blomgren’s Linkedln profile “unemployed” has been replaced by “Apple Inc.” again. According to Tom Halfhill from Microprocessor Report the previously undisclosed purchase price was $121 million.

As Apple continues to strongly invest into proprietary chip development, some gloomily assume that Apple is planning to take over ARM. After all, ARM is a kind of Apple godchild as it was Apple who - as investor and client - gave Acorn the impetus to spin off the processor development into a separate company. However, ARM CEO Warren East has already strongly denied this assumption.

Anyway, Apple continues to give Intel the cold shoulder as far as its small devices are concerned and now Intel partner HP is having a bit on the side. After buying Palm, HP will most likely start focusing more on ARM for its small devices. Microsoft will also be affected by this deal; HP already dropped its Windows plans for its tablet PC “Slate” in favour of WebOS.

So, although Intel can show off high performance and low power consumption values when presenting its Moorestown processor, for some reason its partners are breaking away. According to rumours, LG Electronics, which was supposed to launch the first Moorestown-equipped smartphone, is now also about ready to throw in the towel. And Microsoft is apparently considering equipping future Bing servers with ARM processors.

In order to better defend itself against ARM, Intel has dug up the old SPEC-CPU2000 benchmark. With the given SPECint_2000 value of “more than 500” the smartphone processor with 1.5GHz should be about head to head with Transmeta’s 1.2Ghz Efficeon (526) and behind a 1.6GHz Atom (623). But it’s faster than the 1GHz Cortex A9 (about 245, according to Intel’s bar chart) and performs much better than the iPhone processor Cortex A8 (125).

After a bit of calculating, the chart’s bars also unveil the SPECint_rate2000 value of about 7.4; the duo-core Cortex A9 reaches 5 and a 1.6GHz Atom manages 9.3.

HP@work

Nonetheless, as far as the really big devices are concerned, HP stays loyal to Intel, which it has to because HP clients are generally the ones who attach the most importance to large SMP systems, high availability and, especially, a compatible code base under OpenVMS or HP-UX. Accordingly, HP presented the first systems with the new Itanium quad-core processor Tukwila at the HP Technology@Work 2010 in Frankfurt at the end of April.

The smaller Integrity Blade servers with up to eight Tukwila processors are available right now, while the rack servers and the large Integrity Superdome 2 with up to 64 sockets are supposed to roll out later this year. HP can’t idle now as an official TPC benchmark value (TPC-H with 1TB database) for the Superdome 2 with 16 processors was released at the end of April and according to TPC rules the market launch has to happen within half a year.

Turbo Booster

With 140,181 QphH@1TB (Query-per-Hour) and 12.14 dollars/QphH@1TB, the new Superdome 2 is a little faster than its predecessor with double the amount of Itanium 9140 processors. The latter reaches 123,323 QphH@1TB with the same amount of cores, but – at 20.54 dollars/QphH@1TB – is much less cost-efficient. However, with only nine results within the last two years, this list is very meagre: Power 7 or newer Xeons (like the Nehalem-EX) are completely absent from it. And Sun’s, sorry, Oracle’s M9000 with 32 SPARC64-VI processors from October 2008 (118,573 QphH@1TB, 24.12 dollars/QphH@1TB) is an easy target. Consequently, the Superdome 2 can take the benchmark lead among the systems of up to 64 processors thanks to the absence of other competition. Still, it might be a good idea to compare it to the HP DL785 G6 with eight AMD Istanbul processors that reaches 102,375 QphH@1TB at only 3.63 dollars/QphH@1TB.

At the lower end of the new Blade line, there’s the Integrity BL860c i2 with two Tukwila processors and up to 96GB of memory and the Boxboro chip-set that is also used by the in-house competitor Nehalem-EX. However, for this blade system HP only offers three of the five Itanium 9350 family members announced by Intel – amongst them the Itanium 9350, the fastest (1.86GHz, 24MB L3), most power consuming (185 watts) and most expensive member of the family ($3828, Intel OEM price). HP’s specification of 1.86GHz is a bit bold though, as that performance can only be achieved in turbo boost mode – with its cores partially shut down. When running in normal mode, the correct value is 1.73GHz. Beefing up the specs with “boosted” values is something that hardly anyone has dared to do with the Core i7 or the Westmere-EP until now.

Meanwhile, there are also first SPEC-CPU2006 results for the Integrity BL860c i2 with the Itanium 9350. With a SPECint_rate_base2006 of 128 and a SPECfp_rate_base2006 of 132, it slightly exceeds the promised factor two performance increase in comparison to its predecessor Itanium 9140M in the BL860c, which manages 61 and 46.9 respectively. Unfortunately, this is but around a third of what the Nehalem-EX or Westmere-EP score with two sockets – to say nothing of the big RISC competitor IBM Power 7 with values way beyond 500. Still, performance is not everything, neither with the iPad nor with the iTanium.