I checked out the laptop section. Its just a laptop manufacture by a big same company. Just like the presuccessor of the new alienware. 120 watts power supply on Pentium 4 3.2Ghz. Think about how much room left for other components max 35 watts. Not a good idea to buy laptops like those. Even my 2.8Ghz sony VAIO PCG-GRT170 have 135watt power supply. I still have 65 watts left for other components.

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Is it just me or was there only one CPU in that thing? For my needs, having at least one CPU is priority over some fancy LCD panel on the front of the case. Supposedly multitasking is much better with 2 CPUs. If I were to go super crazy and build the ultimate system, it would be dual Opteron, with 16Gb of RAM (the 32 bit system you linked to can only use 4Gb of system RAM, 64 bit Opterons can use more), Radeon 9800 blah, blah, blah (yes, I found a dual Opteron board with 8x APG, 4 DIMMs, PCI-X, and other goodies, the Tyan "Thunder"), >=1Tb of storage with RAID-5 for speed and reliability. Everything would be water-cooled, even the chipset and RAM. And just like the Opteron-based supercomputers, it would run Linux, which has native support for the Opteron, can handle >4Gb of RAM, and with kernel 2.6, probably 2.4 too, surely beats Windows XP for performance. So it is possible to build a better system, much better actually. If you really want to use Windows, an AMD-64 version of XP should be out soon, but I personally prefer Linux anyway.

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If you talking about dual Opteron, than what about dual/quad/octal Itanium2 system??? It will KILL dual Opteron :)

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Does the Itanium2 have good x86 support? The big problem with the Itanium, as I understand it, is the hardware x86 emulation was so bad software emulation was faster. Also, do any quad-CPU boards have good AGP support? I picked the Opteron because it beats Athlon MP, Xeon, and G5. I don't think I'd consider non-x86 hardware for a desktop at this point, but if I did, Itaniums would be on the bottom of my list. I could be very wrong and the Itanium2 could be better than the Itanium, but I know Opterons are have strong 64 bit performance and run 32 bit x86 code at least as fast as 32 bit only CPUs.

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Jake, Itanium2 supports native x86 instructions, Itanium2 is a 64bit CPU and can easily switch to 32bit, It works with windows 2000/2003...., there are itanium2 single/dual/quad motherboards that support AGP8x :)

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Intel's website states that Windows Server 2003 SP1 will have an IA-32 execution layer. I'm not sure about Linux. This execution layer is supposed to make the Itanium 2 as fast as Xeons of the same clock speed for 32 bit code. Unless Itanium 2s get over 3GHz, that still puts them behind the Opteron for 32 bit performance. The only benchark I've found is here, but it's a little old. Notice that 4 Opterons got nearly the same score as 8 Itanium 2s. At current clock speeds, assuming speed scales linearly, 4 2.0GHz Opterons get 54.2 and 4 1.5GHz Itanium 2s get 42.2.

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It also supports 64bit Windows XP!!! Dude get over it! I personally tested both, Itanium 2 is so much faster!

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I like to think I know how hardware compares. If I'm wrong, I like to know about it. If you have any bencharks, I'd like to see them, because everything I've seen indicates that Itaniums are poor performers that never sold well, and while the Itanium 2 is better, it's still not that great, especially for 32 bit code.

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It's a shame (and really almost a point of bias) those benchmarks you cited left out floating point comparisons. The Itanium2 is fairly adept with those. Try the SPECfp2000 benchmarks with 1 CPU here. When you compare floating point performance per Ghz especially, AMD offerings fall sharply behind. Several benchmarks from SPECint2000 are availible here. Note that a Pentium4 has better (or around equal) performance in this test than an Opteron. In fact, the Opteron compares very close to the Itanium and Pentium 4's at higher clock speeds. Go back to the floating point comparison and see how close the P4 and Opteron are. The Itanium also has the interesting design feature of keeping consistent between base and peak performance. As far as scaling, there are not really many benchmarks in larger systems to compare this yet. The 900Mhz Itanium2's are rumored to be inferior to the slightly modified core of the higher clocked Itanium2's. Also about geek.com benchmark chart is the fact that scaling is confused with performance. At 4 Itanium2 CPU's, you have a 25 rating. At 8, a 50 rating. The Opteron's don't quite double their score between two and four. I don't know why the author cites better scaling with the Opteron - the increase between different numbers of CPU's with the Itanium2 and Opteron is not too significant and even brings the Itanium2 a better rating. The Opterons do have better performance per CPU, but their scaling is not better than the Itanium2 in these results.

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A computing.net member I trust, a web site I trust, and a benchmark I trust. Now we're getting somewhere. Thanks, anonproxy. So I see the Itanium 2 is actually an excellent performer, especially for floating point. Only two problems remain. 1) This still doesn't say how well the Itanium 2 deals with 32 bit code. If you want to run Oracle on HP-UX, then sure, use Itanium 2. But how well does it run Doom III? New games will come out with AMD-64 support, not IA-64. Remember, the whole point of this debate is the ultimate desktop (with some workstation potential). 2) Cost. Aren't quad Itanium 2 systems ~$50,000? I know the point is to waste money, but when you're talking about 10x the cost, it's just not worth it. The real competition is multiple Xeons, which seem to offer better integer performace but worse floating point and don't seem to scale as well. Also, Athlon FXs beat P4s in game benchmarks, which seems to suggest that Opterons would beat Xeons. And that's still with 32 bit versions of the games, as far as I know. Another thing the Opteron has going for it is the ability to address more system memory, but I don't suppose >4Gb would help except for Linux or BSD, which as I understand start caching stuff and trying to use all your RAM to improve performance. I do generally favor AMD, so I'm somewhat biased. However before the 64 bit CPUs were out, I would have gone with Intel. P4s had a strong lead over Athlons at least since 2.8GHz vs. 2800+, as I recall, and the situation was only getting worse. Now I think AMD is ahead somewhat, with the exception of media-related applications (encoding, decoding, rendering, etc.), where Intel has always been strong, probably because of superior SSE2 and higher clock speeds.

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"But how well does it run Doom III?" I doubt Intel or AMD were too focused on that. 32bit code cannot natively run on the Intanium2 - it has to be emulated. It was tried in hardware (ended up being like P1 performance) and now software (Xeon performance promised, don't know yet). "Remember, the whole point of this debate is the ultimate desktop (with some workstation potential)." The Itanium2 is not for the desktop (and right now not a workstation). It was never really designed for the kind of mass market friendliness that the Pentium was, nor was in intended to compete head-to-head in terms of clock speed and game benchmarks. Interestingly, the PowerPC 970 might not have been for the desktop, were it not for Apple. It really takes a platform interest to bring these (explicitly RISC, if you will) chips to market. Cisco uses MIPS R(something-thousand) for their routers (among other networking companies), Windows uses x86, Apple uses PowerPC, etc. Only embedded processors really show marketshare without a strong platform to guide them (Texas Instruments and ARM, for example). Motorola in fact is far more interested in embedded processors (where there is more money) than making chips for Apple (hence the steady divide). The Itanium2 is strange, and ends up not really being that great in most minds as far as it costs too much, doesn't conform to the market demand for (and marriage to) x86, and also does not cater to the desktop market. These things up its cost, which really isolates it from many consumers. Also, it doesn't have any "Hyper" in its referenced technology. Itanium2 is not a desktop CPU and not yet a workstation CPU. Xeon and P4 still are suitable for these roles and Intel is not going to undermine their current chips to supplant them with something like the Itanium2. That said, a lot of experimentation and improvement is happening on the Itanium (and some on the x86-64, but many are ready for a new instruction set like IA-64). The current use of Itaniums is through HP and SGI. HP has some Itaniums deployed in large financial clusters, where HP-UX is used. SGI always has the high-end stuff and their workstations really need floating point performance. The cost leaves the Itanium2 too expensive for generic things. The Linux and Windows masses will be using Opterons, just like they used Pentiums and Athlons instead of Alphas. The memory addressing is only needed in workstations (CAD and engineering programs would drive memory-saving nuts over the edge - 2-3GB is not uncommon) and special servers. Xeon's are capable of more RAM (with an eloquent official hack), but their performance suffers a little. The RAM is not a huge issue - most people will not be buying several GB's of RAM too soon. Opteron's are a much better choice than the Intanium2 in most situations. This could change, but right now AMD has a more marketable chip in this comparison.

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Kirden had me doubting my assumption that Itanium 2s run IA-32 best in software that's not even out yet. I know the Itanium 2 isn't for desktops or even reasonbly priced workstations. AMD-64 CPUs can run 32 bit code natively (and very fast) since they're just 32 bit CPUs with 64 bit extensions. That's why I would pick Opterons if I were to waste a bunch of money on the ultimate desktop system. Again, thanks for clearing things up.

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