Intel Itanium sneak preview

The Itanium doesn't really do too good but there's still hope, maybe it can do x86 floating point calculations fast. To look at that point we'll use the results of FlaskMPEG. Flask is a program to compress video-images and that is, as you will understand, heavy floating-point activity. As input we used a .vob file, ripped from the movie 'The Matrix'. Tom's Hardware was friendly enough to give us some comparison material. To keep a level playing field we used the same settings:

FlaskMPEG setup Codec DivX 3.11 alpha, Fast-Motion Resolution 720 x 480, 29.97 FPS Data rate 910 kbps, keyframe every 10 seconds Audio Not processed

High Quality, x87 optimized:


High Quality, SSE2/3DNow! optimized:


Itanium scores compared:


It is almost superfluous to comment on this because it's clear that the Itanium is lagging severely. The last graph gives some extra information, it shows that SSE2 emulation on the Itanium only makes things worse. That's strange because op the Pentium 4 these 144 additional instructions deliver quite an increase in speed. An explanation for this could be that the translation hardware is having a hard time with the 'special' instructions that are part of IA-32 but that doesn't seem right because the use of MMX does give a decent increase in percentages. The Itanium also has the possibility, apart from translating SSE2, to use native IA-64 SSE2 instructions so translation shouldn't be a problem.

The last benchmark is the program TestCPU, a diverse test of just about all processor aspects: