When we heard we could preview the Itanium we were glad naturally but soon a number of important questions arose. We were about the first to be in this situation and didn't really know how to go about it. After intensive sleuthing across the world, from vague Japanese sites to Intels Developer Forum and emails to a number of big names like Paul DeMone it became clear that there wasn't a single piece of IA-64 software for Itanium to be found. Intels V-Tune 5.0 compiler with support for Itanium and Pentium 4 was only dealt out to a select few and beta versions of Microsoft's SQL Server 64 were not exactly littering the streets either. There are of course IA-64 Linux distributions to be had but because the system was already running under Whistler that would have been a bit tricky.
The advice we got was to focus on x86 performance because, especially in the beginning with the scarcity of IA-64 software, this would be almost as important as the performance in IA-64 mode. The benchmarks we took along will for this reason look quite familiar. On the one side that's nice because it gives you lots of comparable material, on the other hand it's too bad if you can't get a good impression of the performance doing what it was built to do: IA-64.
The test system had the following configuration:
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Unfortunately we couldn't take any pictures of the test system because the design and the ubiquitous serial numbers would betray whose system it was and this person would get in trouble. I CAN tell you that the system is blunt. It takes two strong men to lift the case and the average vacuum cleaner makes less noise than this system and that is not a joke. All in all very impressive but you want to see the benchmarks.
Whistler wouldn't cooperate too much, we don't know if it was because of Whistler or because of the exotic Itanium hardware but many of the standard benchmark suites wouldn't run. Sisoft Sandra 2000 refused to install, Sysmark 2000 and WinBench99 same story. 3DMark 2000 and Quake 3 refused to work because the video card wasn't DirectX 7 compatible. There we were, a pile of software to make the most of our limited time but right away this uncooperative attitude of the system. We couldn't even make a WPCUID screenshot so this will have to do:
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