Alpha Release Of Red Hat's Itanium Distro

nicktook writes: "ZDNet has this story that RedHat has released a full alpha distribution for the 64-bit Itanium processor. Can Itanium hardware even be bought yet?" Not by jes folks, that's for sure. cnoe also sent a link to the official announcement from Red Hat as well. Coupled with SGI's release of Pro64 compilers for Itanium, it seems like Intel's Next Big Chip keeps whispering "penguins." Stunning news from MS on this front is long overdue.

Comments

And???

[Issue9mm]

Okay, not to seem like the naysayer here, as I'm all for this. Props out to RedHat for making this come together as quickly as they have. It's not often a free OS can beat MS outta the gate on hardware support.

On the other hand, I'm seeing a lot of posts saying that this is going to 'make' Linux. I'm sorry kids. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, nothing is going to 'make' Linux all by itself. Awareness is the only thing that will 'make' Linux.

How many people were hit by the I.Love.you virus? Probably close to the same number of people that have learned to accept such 'inconveniences' in day to day life. Sure, we wouldn't put up with it, but we don't have to. We know other things. Anyway, I'm getting offtopic...

What I'm trying to say, is that the average, every-day, Joe Blow Consumer doesn't care about proc optimizations and compatability. If they hear that Microsoft doesn't have one running Itanium yet, they'll wait to buy Itanium chips. When MS is ready, so will they be. The chances they'll run across an Itanium with RHat on it at their local Circuit City, or CompUSA, or Best Buy is slim to none. And even if they do, they're not going to bite. They'll wait for MS to push them towards Itanium. And then they'll go out and plunk out the cost of yet another OS upgrade, and won't pay it a second notice.

This is our sad reality... Accept it. No single feature, optimization, or compatibility will 'make' Linux. We're not going to sweep Microsoft under the rug with this. We may gain a few users, and that's fine with me. Every little bit counts. Once people become aware that there is an operating system out there that doesn't crash every day, or run slower as they day progresses, they won't want to go back. At that point it will become worth the effort to learn a new OS.

Take it how you want.

Stunning news from Micorsoft.

[Black Parrot]

> Stunning news from MS on this front is long overdue.

I dunno. I was stunned by several news stories about Micorsoft over the last couple of weeks. Promiscuous love letters, the Cookie Monster, and now sordid revelations about Clippy's secret life.

What Micorsoft needs right now is longer gaps between stunning revelations.

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Re:What's the advantage of 64 bit?

[WedgeAntilles]

It's really not the "64-bit" that makes it better / faster (although it does help a bit with the wider datapath and all). What is really cool about the IA-64 instruction architecture is the extremely sophisticated use of ILP (instruction level parallelism). In ILP terms, the Itanium (and other IA-64 processors) uses a hybrid of various ILP architectures to achieve maximum utilization of all the sub components of the processor. The IA-64 architecture is designed to give information that allows the processor to run certain instructions at the same time or before other instructions have completed, etc. Moreover, the IA-64 architecture is not locked in to one specific processor make-up (as some other advanced architectures are). Thus, you can make an IA-64 chip with say 3 integer units, 2 floating point units, and 4 fetch / store units and it can use the exact same programs and instruction set as an IA-64 chip with 5 integer units, 4 floating point units and 20 fetch / store units (for example). Also, IA-64 is designed to be enormously compatible with IA-32 (modern x86) code so that you don't have to get all new versions of every program.

In comparitive terms, the Itanium is to the P6 core what the P6 core was to the original Pentium (P5) core. The Pentium brought ILP to the x86 line in a very big way and blew away the 486 with it's Superscalar architecture, and the P6 blows away the Pentium with it's speculative execution and other features, etc. The Itanium will be about as big a change. The disadvantage though is that to fully take advantage of the processor, programs and OS's need to be recompiled, though hopefully this won't be too big of a problem.

Re:What's the advantage of 64 bit?

[espensk]

Since other people have talked about the advantages of the Itanium in particular, I thought that I should try to actually answer your question: what is the advantages of 64-bit systems?

Well, for starters, 64-bit systems usually comes with 64-bit data paths (buses). I'm saying usually because one could in theory implement a 8-bit bus that semantically behaved like a 64-bit bus. For instance, Amigas have 32-bit CPUs, but were equipped with a 16-bit bus. Having wider buses helps a great deal for most applications since the memory bandwidth is increased.

Also, 64-bit systems usually comes with a bus address path that is more than 32 bits. For instance, MIPS is 64-bit and is equipped with a bus that accepts 54 address bits (is this correct?). This enables you to put more than 4GB of memory into the machine and actually access the memory in a clean way from you appliction.

One of the most intriguing aspects of 64-bit architectures though, is that your virtual memory addess space is 64 bits. This allow you to implement things like single address space operating systems. You can also have huge files mapped into your address space (imagine having a movie of, say a few hundred gigs, mapped into your application), easing the development of applications tremendously. You could denote a few upper bits of an address to identifying hosts, and implement a large cluster of distributed shared memory. You could denote parts of the address to containing the process id, leaving you with a system where one particular address is unique both over time and among other applications. The list goes on...

As you can see, 64-bit architectures offer some obvious performance advantages. The biggest advantage though, as I see it, is that it opens up the door for some interseting operating system research/design.

Re:What's the advantage of 64 bit?

[phandel]

Check out this article from Performance Computing. Describes the IA-64 and its advantages.

I hate to say it...

[jerdenn]

In a press release on Feb 17, 2000, Microsoft already anounced that they had released The IA-64 SDK for 64-bit Windows.

It includes a 64-bit server version of Windows 2000, a Microsoft C/C++ compiler and linker for IA-64, Intel C++ and FORTRAN 90 compilers for 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Windows 2000 libraries, header files and run-time libraries.

I supposed that I will be marked down as trolling. I'm not. I'm merely pointing out that this story was not properly researched before posting.

Linux is not the first to release a 64-bit Alpha release for the Itanium. The biggest difference here is that the Linux Alpha is available to the general public, while the Win64 version is only available to OEMs and key ISVs.

-jerdenn