Review Itanium

- Pre-release hardware:

The Itanium we tested is, as you know, a 667MHz model. The versions that will be released will run at 733 and 800MHz. That extra clockspeed will not mean that the Itanium suddenly becomes a lot faster but we should assume that the final version could undergo other changes, like a faster revision of the core or a faster IA-32 decoder. It's pretty unlikely that the performance will suddenly increase a lot but it wouldn't be a surprise if it would increase.

- Pre-release software:

Windows Whistler itself is still beta, but also the IA-64 HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) is probably nowhere near finished. Microsoft will probably improve and optimize many things before the release, which will also result in better performance. Remember, we don't know in what part the slowness is caused by the software and in what part by the hardware.

- Lack of IA-64 benchmarks:

We could not run IA-64 software on the system, simply because it was nowhere to be found. It should be remembered that the Itanium was 100% developed for IA-64 and that the IA-32 decoder was only unimportant to Intel. The true power of the cpu lies not in the tests that we conducted but in the applications that are still being developed. Early benchmarks with IA-64 code on Itanium systems have shown that the new architecture is certainly capable of blowing the P4 out of the water with half the clockspeed.

From our own experience we can only talk about Whistler, the only piece of Itanium software that we've been able to check out. The operating system ran smooth, which at least leads us to conclude that the Itanium in IA-64 mode is at least as fast as a Pentium III or Athlon at the same clockspeed.