Itanium 2 vs Xeon

[queuebert]

I am looking to put together a server and was wondering how the Itanium 2 processor compared to the latest Xeon processors. Obviously, the Xeons have the higher clockspeed, but it looks like the Itaniums might be more powerful at the lower clockspeeds. I was searching for benchmarks but nothing seems to compare modern Itanium 2 CPUs to modern Xeon CPUs. Does anyone have an opinion on this, or possibly know of a site that does these kinds of comparisons?

Thanks,
Sean

 

[franklin97355]

http://portals.devx.com/Intel/Article/7013/0/page/1

http://www.aceshardware.com/SPECmine/index.jsp?b=1&s=1&v=1&if=0&r1f=2&r2f=5&m1f=0&m2f=0&o=0&o=1&o=2

 

[queuebert]

That was helpful, thank you.

One other thing I'm having difficulty finding a direct answer to is this... do you have to have a special/particular version of Windows 2000 Server to run it on an Itanium processor?

 

[dakota81]

With the Itanium, intel ditched the x86 architecture, and thus does require a different version of Windoes 2000 than what is commonly available.

The Itaniums also rely heavily on compiler optimizations to perform well, so that's a factor in the performance of software & if they can compete with the Xeon counterpart.


Lastly, might consider also an Opteron server? Only major drawback here is Microsoft doesn't have a 64-bit OS ready and won't until sometime next year. However, current 32-bit OS's do work on the opterons as well (as fast as the Xeon's), and Linux has a 64-bit server OS ready for AMD.