Itanium 2 MCAD benchmarks still not there

A LARGE SYSTEMS INTEGRATOR has confirmed that benchmarks for the MCAD, Pro/Engineer marketplace still await to be released by HP, but claimed that comparing IA-32 workstations with the Itanium platform was not relevant anyway.

An executive at Intrinsic Technology, said that while HP has run MCAD benchmarks on both its Itanium 2 box and Pentium IVs, a "true comparison" between the two chips is not possible, although he confirmed that the Pentium IV apparently gave much better performance.

The MCAD Pro/Engineer benchmarks were run at 900MHz or 1GHz on the Itanium 2 version 2, compared to a 3.06GHz Pentium IV workstation platform.

HP apparently told Intrinsic that IA-32 Pentium IV workstations are not meant for the "big workstation game" and shouldn't be compared with Itanium 2 boxes, because they are aimed at completely different sections of the technical computing market.

"The type of arena into which the Itanium2 is intended is the high end technical computing environment where previously only UNIX environments could cope with the computing & graphics intensive performance requirements," she told the INQUIRER.

She claimed that one of Intrinsic's customers is working on models using over half a million different components, and Pentium IV and Pentium III workstations couldn't even open the model.

The Itanium 1 managed to do this, she said, "Albeit at a very, very slow rate. Our customer didn't care how long it took to open the model - they could actually deliver the project to their customer as required, something they could never have achieved with IA32 workstations."

The firm's customer had worked closely with PTC in the US because it was the only "live project running on Itanium with the new Pro/E 64-bit Windows application".

The Itanium 1 took a mere 11 hours to open the model.

And at last year's Pro/E user conference in the US, the firm's customer won second prize for the largest model run on this environment, second only to a model run by NASA.

The HP Itanium 2 using one CPU managed to open the same model in an hour, she said, cutting down the sludgy 11 hours to one hour.

"Even HP was blown away by this performance improvement, as they had only predicted a possible doubling up of performance moving from Itanium1 to 2," she added.

She said it's also important to remember that the workstation is still running on a beta version of Windows XP 64.

"It will be interesting to see what improvements will be seen once the commercial version becomes available - not to mention the sort of improvements Madison is expected to give," she added.

So, as we said in our first article, the fact is HP still doesn't have benchmarks for the Pro/E type of platform. µ

See Also
INQUIRER switches "from bias to advocacy"
Itanium 2 not yet suitable for workstation push