Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

dean gaudet
2003-02-24T02:05:19Z

On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, David Mosberger wrote:

> >>>>> On Sun, 23 Feb 2003 17:06:29 -0800 (PST), dean gaudet <dean-list-linux-kernel@arctic.org> said:
>
> Dean> On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, David Mosberger wrote:
> >> >>>>> On Sun, 23 Feb 2003 14:48:48 -0800 (PST), David Lang <david.lang@digitalinsight.com> said:
>
> David.L> I would call a 15% lead over the ia64 pretty substantial.
>
> >> Huh? Did you misread my mail?
>
> >> 2 GHz Xeon: 701 SPECint
> >> 1 GHz Itanium 2: 810 SPECint
>
> >> That is, Itanium 2 is 15% faster.
>
> Dean> according to pricewatch i could buy ten 2GHz Xeons for about
> Dean> the cost of one Itanium 2 900MHz.
>
> Not if you want comparable cache-sizes [1]:

somehow i doubt you're quoting Xeon numbers w/2MB of cache above. in
fact, here's a 701 specint with only 512KB of cache @ 2GHz:

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2002q1/cpu2000-20020128-01232.html

my point was that if you had comparable die sizes the 15% "advantage"
would disappear. there's a hell of a lot which could be done with the
approximately double die size that the itanium 2 has compared to any of
the commodity x86 parts. but then the cost per part would be
correspondingly higher... which is exactly what is shown in the intel cost
numbers.

a more fair comparison would be your itanium 2 number with this:

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2002q4/cpu2000-20021021-01742.html

2MB L2 Xeon @ 2GHz, scores 842.

is this the itanium 2 number you're quoting us?

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2002q3/cpu2000-20020711-01469.html

'cause that's with 3MB L3.

-dean

>
> Intel Xeon MP, 2MB L3 cache: $3692
>
> Itanium 2, 1 GHZ, 3MB L3 cache: $4226
> Itanium 2, 1 GHZ, 1.5MB L3 cache: $2247
> Itanium 2, 900 MHZ, 1.5MB L3 cache: $1338
>
> Intel basically prices things by the cache size.
>
> --david
>
> [1]: http://www.intel.com/intel/finance/pricelist/
>