MaximumPC 2006 10

5 MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCCOCTOBER 2006

Now slightly faster than SneakerNet!

Powerline networking is one of those

ideas that brings to mind the adage, “If

it sounds too good to be true, it usually

is.” Because few houses come pre-wired

with Ethernet, it makes sense to use

the already-installed electrical wiring

that connects every room for network-

ing. There’s nothing inherently wrong

with this idea. But in practice, powerline

networking has proven to be an abysmal

method for transferring data. Or perhaps

that’s being too kind.

When so-called HomePlug products

were fi rst demonstrated in 2002, they

were spec’d at a lowly 14Mb/s, but they

couldn’t even reach those speeds. Most of

the time they operated in the sub-1Mb/s

range, and in some cases were slower

than a dial-up modem. The technology

could also disrupt your electricity, didn’t

work with surge protectors, and in the

worst possible scenario, could allow a

hacker access to your network if he had a

long extension cord or lived next door.

Revisions have attempted to correct

all of these problems, but Maximum PC

tests have debunked recent claims that

HomePlug has “fi xed” its problems. We

benchmarked a Netgear adapter in May

2006 that was rated as having 85Mb/s

performance, but which operated at a

sad 150KB/s. We’ve reviewed the new

“200Mb/s” version of the powerline net-

working technology on page 96.

Interesting

fact: If you look

up the word “boondog-

gle” in the dictionary you’ll see

an image of Intel’s Itanium processor.

Interesting

fact: If you look

up the word “boondog-

gle” in the dictionary you’ll see

an image of Intel’s Itanium processor.

Intel Itanium

Iceberg, off the starboard bow!

Itanium was a high-end server CPU

announced by Intel and HP way back

in 1994. It was designed to extend the

Wintel platform into the high-power (and,

presumably, high-profi t) world of big-iron

server computing. The idea made sense

at the time: Moore’s law dictated that cur-

rent chip designs would sooner or later

reach an architectural limit that would pre-

vent further evolution of that technology.

The HP/Intel solution was named EPIC

(Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing),

an architecture designed to leverage

64-bit technology (at the time, x86 used

32-bit registers) and be more effi cient than

existing designs at speculative processing

and parallel processing.

After seven years, the partnership

actually managed to ship a product.

Code-named Merced, the fi rst Itanium

CPU ran at up to 800MHz and, rather

crucially, could run Windows in vari-

ous fl avors. (About the same time, Intel

shipped the fi rst 1.5GHz Pentium 4

chips.) HP called the release of Itanium “a

whole new chapter in high-end comput-

ing.” What a chapter it was.

Immediately upon its release, Merced

was roundly dismissed as

a technological disaster and

dubbed the “Itanic.” Its perfor-

mance was worse than a simi-

larly clocked x86 processor—and

not by a little, but by a staggering

80 percent or more. The technical

reasons are complicated (involving the

high latency of the L3 cache, the inad-

equate capacities of L1 and L2 caches,

and insuffi cient cache bandwidth), but

the impact was immediately apparent:

Nobody bought Itanium servers.

Well, there was one company that

bought them: Intel’s co-partner HP. That

company is the only major Itanium vendor

remaining, and sells thousands of fi ve- and

six-fi gure Itanium servers every quarter,

worth a few hundred million dollars. (The

number-two Itanium vendor, SGI, is bank-

rupt.) Alas, those sales do little to offset the

billions of dollars (at least $10 billion) that

Intel and company have invested over the

life of the disastrous platform. Sales are

nowhere near original expectations.

Meanwhile, Intel released Itanium 2 in

2002, and benchmark results were more

in line with expectations, but it was almost

certainly too late. Thanks to AMD’s Athlon

64 CPU, 64-bit computing had arrived

on desktops, and server users remained

happy with existing RISC architectures.

Intel’s own Xeon server CPU, a relatively

inexpensive x86 CPU, greatly outsells the

Itanium today.

Shockingly, with billions of losses

mounting and the writing clearly etched

upon the wall, Intel has no plans to aban-

don the chip. The Itanium roadmap cur-

rently stretches to 2008. And somehow,

Intel and HP recently convinced seven

other companies (including poor SGI)

to funnel $10 billion more into the thing.

What’s that saying about a sucker being

born every minute?

Tech Tragedies

Powerline Networking

Are you or anyone you know using pow-

erline networking? We thought not. erline networking? We thought not.

Are you or anyone you know using pow-

Powerline Networking