Itanium 2's..Need info/advice

I was browsing ebay and I ran across some Itanium 2 (900 MHz's) going for $35 shipped. I'm really thinking about buying 2 to 4 of them. I'm thinking of putting together an FAH SMP rig. I've posted in the FAH section to see if the SMP client would work.

I'm posting here to ask 1) Where can I get a cheaper motherboard for it? I've done a little googling and all the motherboards are like $500+++.

Also if I remember correctly don't the Itaniums have a way to run X86 OSes? I think they have like integrated virtulization? Would this help me get the FAH client running? If not, then let me also ask how good are Itaniums? Wikipedia said that an 800Mhz Itanium 2 gets ~3.2 GFLOPS. But how do they do on other applications? I know it would make a great webserver but could it be used to play say a quake 3 like game? Could this be used at lan parties?

As much as I know about Itaniums there is 3x as much I don't know.

Thanks guys.

Oooooo fancy

I wouldnt know a single thing about Itaniums, but good luck to ya

As far as I recall the Itaniums won't run x86 stuff, but I need someone to back me up on that. However if you can get a distro of linux compiled for the Itanium and put folding on there that would be some mad folding performance IMO. As for mobo's, I can't help ya there I would expect them to be expensive though.

~jtjuska

The itaniums are 64 bit only they will run x86 under emulation but very poorley you can get 64 bit linux distros wich will run fine with these cpu's as for folding i know very little about it. I have also looked at motherboards for itaniums and have yet to find a cheap one. Good luck with your search.

IMO you'd be better off with some AXP's clocked to the heavens. much cheaper mobos and ram

Windows XP-64 has an option to install IA-64 for support of Itaniums.

If folding is ploating point calculations Itaniums will do well, otherwise I wouldn't bother unless you like saying stick to those IBM cheapskates that stuck us with x86 as our primary CPU type in the PC marketplace.

speed bump said:

Windows XP-64 has an option to install IA-64 for support of Itaniums.

If folding is ploating point calculations Itaniums will do well, otherwise I wouldn't bother unless you like saying stick to those IBM cheapskates that stuck us with x86 as our primary CPU type in the PC marketplace.

Click to expand...

FAH does use mostly floating point calculations. Also I just check gromacs.org, gromacs is their primary core they use. It has already been ported to the IA64 architecture. So I'd say at least 1/4 of the work is done for them to release a IA64 based FAH client.

Heck it might be as easy as all they need to do is swap out the core with a IA64 version. I'm not sure how much of all optimizations they have done to the core verses the standard source of gromacs core.

This does still seem far fetched. I bought one Itanium II for $35 shipped. The others are in a Ebay store and aren't up for auction so I can hold off on purchasing more until I find a motherboard that I can get...or else I might just can this whole idea.