Nick Maclaren said:
|>
|> It's also wise to observe exactly who was doing the talking - Terry Shannon,
|> well-known HP shill.
That is unfair. He is biassed, because he wouldn't get cooperation
if he wasn't, but he is not simply a shill.
I suppose if you have kept anywhere nearly as close track of Terry's pro-HP
blather as I have, especially since June 25, 2001, you have a right to make
such a statement (though I'll still challenge it).
Have you?
I'll append below a copy of the rebuttal to his two new 'analyses' that I
posted on comp.os.vms:
In 'Beyond Superdome", he first waxes poetic about current Superdome
capabilities, such as their internal interconnect fabric. Let's see: this
is the server architecture (at least somewhat reminiscent of the old and
rather mediocre GS320 server architecture) that using 64 top-of-the-line
Itanics barely manages to stay ahead of the new POWER5 box that requires
only 16 processors (on a grand total of 8 chips, since they're dual-core) in
TPC-C, right?
Then he crows, "HP delivers dual core before Intel" as some kind of
significant achievement. Well, maybe. Of course, Sun is delivering
dual-core SPARC processors today, and IBM started delivering dual-core
POWER4s nearly three years ago. So what beating Intel to the punch mostly
proves is just how far behind the curve Itanic really is, I'd suggest.
Then he starts talking about "How Superdome will maintain leadership", but
in fact that will be impossible - because it's not in the lead right now, so
there's no way it can 'maintain' any lead. And in fact, it will only fall
farther behind during the time-frame during which any reasonably informed
projections can be made.
Terry's first projected performance graph for OLTP explains why. Doubling
current system performance by about a year from now actually sounds pretty
impressive, until you recognize that Superdome's TPC-C performance today
with 64 processors falls slightly behind today's previous-design-generation
POWER4+ systems that use only half that number of processors and only
slightly manages to beat today's POWER5 boxes that use only 1/4th as many
processors. POWER5 will shortly be available with up to 64 processors,
which means that it should beat today's Superdome performance by a factor of
at least 3 within a few months. When Montecito comes along late next year
it will indeed close much of this gap with POWER5 (Terry's second
TPC-C-specific performance graph suggests it should slightly exceed 2
million tpmC), but POWER5 (a full process generation behind Montecito but
still heading for about 3 million tpmC late *this* year) will no longer be
IBM's top-of-the-line product by then, since POWER5+ (in the same process
generation as Montecito) should then be shipping and upping the ante
significantly.
No, once the full-sized POWER5 boxes appear there's no way that
top-of-the-line Superdome OLTP performance should be able to reach more than
about 50% of top-of-the-line POWER performance any time soon. Maybe Tukwila
will help close that gap when it arrives in 2007. Or maybe not, because
POWER6 is due around then. And Fujitsu has regular enhancements to SPARC64
coming along to keep pace with Itanic (though not POWER), regardless of what
one may think of Sun's future efforts for that architecture.
But perhaps the more important observation is that all the glowing
descriptions Terry makes about Superdome are not only features that IBM
perfected many years ago but are things that make pricing anything *but*
commodity-level. So Superdome won't be offering industry-leading
performance *or* industry-leading price/performance, because the x86-64
brigade will be attacking it from beneath on the second front.
'Son of Superdome' will be "Superdome-centric with Alpha attributes"?
That's, like, deja vu all over again: exactly the kind of thing that people
like Terry and Kerry and Rob were telling us the week of June 25, 2001 -
except that the time-frame being discussed back then for the appearance of
the "Alpha/IA64 hybrid" was about now, not 2007.
Well, given that 'about now' is upon us and I don't see any "Alpha/IA64
hybrids" being benchmarked, 2007 seems at least a lot more credible. I
guess my prediction of 2006 three years ago was slightly optimistic, but for
a 5-year-out guesstimate I don't feel *that* ashamed of it.
Terry may have been able to make the Superdome story sound superficially
attractive, but it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny when the *rest* of the
industry is taken into account. And it's also worth considering just how
Terry's fawning descriptions of more long-term architecture development gibe
with the recent reports of a grinning Shane Robison wielding an axe to R&D
like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Moving right along, we come to "Why IPF and Why HP: Because SPARC is dead,
Power5 isn't ready for prime time and Extentions won't cut it in the
datacenter."
SPARC is dead, eh? Or 'no longer relevant', as a later slide says. Someone
better tell Fujitsu so it will stop stomping all over the latest Itanics in
commercial benchmarks like jbb2000: that's really not suitable behavior for
a 'dead' processor. And by all means make sure those HP customers who are
defecting to Sun know this: what on earth do you suppose they're thinking?!
As for POWER5 not being ready for prime time, I guess we can say good-bye to
IBM: if they've released an unready product to their customer base, said
base won't be with them for long. Or could one possibly suppose that Terry
is simply blowing yet more thick, black smoke out of his ass for HP?
Intel waited until 1986 to 'begin executing a plan to achieve microprocessor
dominance'? Don't let the iAPX-432 people hear you say that! Oh, wait -
that failed and disappeared after a few years of futile effort...
And Terry's still shouting as loudly as he can (what size font was that?)
that Compaq made the *right* decision to kill Alpha. Well, despite what he
claims, three-plus years later history really doesn't seem at all inclined
to support that thesis, but when you're talking about what history *will*
prove you always have a built-in response to such observations: just wait
some more...
Terry's purported 'analyses' of the relative potential of EPIC vs. RISC, of
relative performance predictions for Itanic vs. Alpha, and of the commercial
viability of Alpha remain as chock-full of shit as ever. They are no more
convincing when looking back from today's vantage point than they were three
years ago, and I'm not going to bother to debunk them in detail yet again:
POWER5 has already done a more than adequate job of doing that out in the
real world, and EV8 (which of course would be shipping today, had it not
been canceled) would have done an even better one. As for the idea that at
least Itanic would provide a compatible hardware platform on which to run
both IA64 *and* IA32 code, well... turns out the hardware supporting IA32
wasn't quite up to the job, so they're replacing it with software
emulation - you know, like Alpha used? But that emulation, though faster
than the previous disaster on Itanic, still can't hold a candle to native
IA32 processors that can run *both* 32-bit and 64-bit code at full speed.
And what's with the slide that shows 64-bit Itanic code out-performing IA32
by a factor of about 2:1 right about now? Last time I checked, they were
pretty much dead-even in many benchmarks, and where that was not true the
leads were split about evenly. Couldn't be just a *bit* of misdirection in
such a slide, could there?
Note how carefully Terry refers to x86-64 as 'extensions' to a 32-bit
architecture, rather than as an actual 64-bit architecture. Kind of makes
you wonder why he doesn't refer to IA32 as 'extensions' to a 16-bit
architecture, doesn't it? After all, that's exactly the same concept.
If you don't believe that IA32 qualifies as a 'real' 32-bit architecture
(despite rather a lot of commercial and scientific evidence to the
contrary), I guess you could swallow the suggestion that x86-64 isn't really
a 64-bit architecture, even though it shows every promise of competing on
equal (and ofter better) footing with the 'real' 64-bit architectures out
there. Ah, Terry. And if you think that Itanic offers any performance
advantage over x86-64, you haven't looked at benchmarks lately.
As for talking about the decline in quality of the trade press, Terry,
that's pretty hard to stomach coming from such a trasnsparent HP
sock-puppet. But the bolder the lie, the more you seem attracted to it.
But inundating readers with dozens of pages of impressive-sounding buzzwords
that he himself apparently understands only in the vaguest terms may
actually be effective in convincing some portion of the population. It
really does seem that HP ought to be paying him *something* for this effort,
plus perhaps a significant tip for the total abandonment of personal
integrity that it requires.
- bill
