Intel Itanium sneak preview

Luckily there are more benchmarks than the ones you see everywhere. Like the distributed.net client, better known as the cow. Luckily this one would work on the system although the processor wasn't recognized obviously. After the automatic selection of the fastest core we started the benchmark with anticipation. A few seconds later our jaws were on the floor because the Itanium didn't even make 96 kkeys/s, a score that is even beatable for 486's! The Rc5 cores of the client are naturally heavily optimized for real x86 processors which basically makes a good score unlikely but this bad wasn't expected by anyone.


As second test we have Tom Kerrigan's Simple Chess Program, a small program explicitly written to stress the processors branch predictors to the limit. The tool does this by a simulation of a game of chess. After calculating a number of moves three times the average speed of the processor in MIPS is produced. The EPIC hardware would theoretically be capable of outperforming IA-32 processors on this kind of activities but the x86 - IA-64 converter didn't do the job very well. The score of the Itanium would make you cry here too, even the Pentium 100 outperformed it while the 1,5GHz Pentium 4 was 20 times as fast:

Before we go over to more real-life benchmarks we have one more synthetic, Stream, a program that measures the memory bandwidth while doing certain operations. We don't know if the difference is attributable to the motherboard or the processor but the Itanium was relatively faster in bandwidth. Instead of floating around the level of a Pentium 75 it neared the performance of a Pentium 200 :