I was just wondering, what are the difference between these three prossesors and why is there such a big price gap between them. Thanks.

P4 is an x86 (IA-32) compliant desktop chip designed for consumer use and business use.

Xeon is an x86 (IA-32) compliant chip designed for business use. Large caches are really the only difference (AFAIK) between it and the high end P4's.

Itanium is not an x86 complaint chip (although it does have builin emulation for x86, albeit slow emulation). The Itanium is Intel's IA-64 based chip. Designed only for high-end business applications, this behemoth was supposed to take on the RISC chips that dominated the business sector for so long. As far as most are concerned, it has been pretty much a flop (sorry to any Itanic users).

-Weaver

Thanks John, isn't Intel making a new 64 bit chip for destops?

Yes, word/rumor has it that they just "reverse engineered" AMD's x86-64 (AMD64) chip layout/etc. To be honest, there is nothing wrong with that, AMD had to do it to Intel at one point.

I don't know if that part is true, but Intel will be participating in the 64 bit desktop market.

-Weaver

Thanks, I've always prefered intel's proccessor's for some reason. Thats why I'm really looking foward to a 64 bit intel proccesor.

Quote:
After investigating the instruction sets used by 64-bit chips from AMD and Intel, an industry analyst has concluded that Intel reverse-engineered the AMD64 instruction set to create its own 64-bit microprocessor architecture.

Tom Halfhill, an analyst at In-Stat/MDR in San Jose, said Monday that he had compared the instruction sets of AMD's 64-bit chips, called AMD64, with the 64-bit extensions to be used in the Intel Xeon processor and future desktop chips. The smoking gun, Halfhill said, was Intel's choice to mimic a decision AMD made in its early Opteron designs, and later reversed.


While AMD has been doing this to Intel for years, it seems that the tables have turned. It also shows to what lengths Intel is willing to go to not admit that AMD was right.

Why reverse engineer?
Intel has cross licensing rights with AMD as part of their last settlement.

To make a better product?
I truly doubt that is the case (outside of the Marketing Dept.).

To not let AMD control the future direction of 64-bit computing?
Now this strikes me as the most likely reason. Having vast experience in controlling the market, Intel doesn't really know how to follow. Adopting a strategy of "Usurp, Overthrow, and then Lead" would put Intel back in control. Assuming Redmond lets them.

The main difference between xeon and Itanium chips, as i have come to understand it (besides the obvious differnce or a 64-bit archetecture) is that the Xeon actually provides BETTER performace in some instances. If you run the benchmarks on Intels own site you see that while the difference isn't much the fact that there performace is so close yet there price so far appart is baffeling. The Xeon MP runing at 3GHz with a 3mb cache ran about 118,000 operations per second on the Java business application benchmark. while the more expencive Itanium 2 runing at 1.5GHz (numbers are not directly relational due to archatetural differences) with a 6mb cache ran only 116,000 operations per second on the same test. Just thought this was an interesting observation. This many change with the introduction of better server side applications with better utiliztion of the 64-bit archatecture, but as it stands i doesn't look like an Itanium is that good a deal.

Thats werid, if Xeon preforms better than why would the Itanium be so much more expensive?

What does 32-bit and 64-bit do?

extermination wrote:

What does 32-bit and 64-bit do?

64 bit is just the advanced version of 32 bit. it has something to do with the size of your BUS. your local BUS can transfer data at twice the speed. the only disadvantage (at this moment) is that not all the hardware is available in a 64 bit edition.