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Windows Reaches 64-Bits, For OEMs
thatrez writes: "Microsoft 's Windows Advanced Server, Limited Edition, is now
available for computers based on Intel's 64-bit Itanium chip. The
Itanium chip supports greater amounts of system memory and offers
stronger floating-point, or mathematical, capabilities than current
32-bit desktop processors. The extra memory support and the
floating-point capabilities increase the performance of Web hosting,
data warehousing and other applications." Now available in this case means that certain OEMs will soon be selling systems loaded with 64-bit Advanced Server, and later other manufacturers will join in. 64-bit versions of XP are expected sometime next year as well.
just about 6 mos (?) after the 64-bit linux stuff was announced. It's incredible how much progress you can make with billions of $$s backing you up.
"Advanced Server for Advanced Dummies"
I can't wait.
-... ---
Yea it'll work on the 64 bit chips, by reducing their functionality to that of a 32-bit chip. Much like how it now utilizes a 32-bit chip at the level of a 16-bit chip.
Sorry, maybe I'm missing something here but how does increased floating point performance equate to significantly better web serving? (either of static content or dynamic) I'm very skeptical but I'm also curious to see if there is an aspect to this I've previously missed. The increased memory addressability otoh makes perfect sense, apache sure can be a hungry beast when you lard those chillen' (yeah, I'm from the southern US ;) ) up with mod_perl et al...
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
As far as I can recall, Window NT has been running on Alpha for years. But that port may have been due the effort of compaq's engineering people and not microsoft.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
This release will not work on AMD SledgeHammer. This one is particularly for the IA64 instruction set, not IA32 or x86-64. The standard Windows 2000 and Windows XP will work just fine on SledgeHammer, if you want to waste all that AMD goodness on a 32-bit Microsoft OS.
Microsoft is also considering an x86-64 port of Windows XP, but they have not announced their decision yet.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
ObLinuxComment: Let's make Linux 128-bit clean, just for the hell of it, so it's ready for when someone makes a 128-bit processor to run it on.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
though the alpha was a 64bit processory, the wnt port was still 32bit.
Now CodeRed can scan IP's addys for unpatched IIS machines to infect in half the time.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
All you would get for your trouble is a crippling licence fee (courtesy of MS), a dearth of 64-bit applications & drivers, slower 32-bit execution and double the memory and disk requirements. These are hardly compelling reasons to "upgrade".
What do average desktop users need 64 bits of unbelievable number crunching power for?
Who said that this is for desktop users? Last I checked, there are more than a few admins and developers who read Slashdot who actually use hardware like this (and much bigger)....
Aren't current desktop computers already majorly overpowered? What do average desktop users need 64 bits of unbelievable number crunching power for?
Two Words: Video Compression
Seriously, while 64 bit processors running at 1.x GHZ will be wasted on desktops, this power is just the sort of thing to beef up existing dual and quad CPU SQL servers.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Wow, I have to get it quick - will it come with an extra disc with commentary and "making of" features?
Does anyone know if it comes in a metal lunchbox, or tin case?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder if Windows 2000 Advanced Server Limited Edition is about as much 64 bit as Windows 95 is 32 bit.
.NET thing so popular that Windows will make it all the way to world domination?
Undoubtedly parts of this version of Windows 2000 has to remain 32 bit for compatibility. Or is Microsoft going to port Microsoft Office to 64 bit Windows as well? Unless Microsoft has implemented some type of FX!32 (DECs 32 -> 64 bit layer which "learns" and accellerates), this release of Windows may potentially be quite useless. One of the reasons people use Windows is the availability of applications.
I can't for the life of me think that this is anything different from a marketing release where Microsoft can say "We're in the future, we're 64 bit". But it's nevertheless interesting that Microsoft has gotten something out the door that is 64 bit. Let's see how well Microsoft entrenches itself in the datacenters. My guess is that the 64 bit x86 (Intel or AMD) will become far cheaper than the Sun counterparts and thus taking over a lot, but not everything. But will Windows be the preferred platform or is Linux going to hit Microsoft where it hurts? Or perhaps Microsoft will make this
In either case, from a technical standpoint I will observe how Windows 64 bit is going. Very interesting indeed.
Alex
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
NT drove the Alpha in 32-bit mode. That doesn't count.
The new versions of 64-bit XP are getting useeful again. The first rev's of 64bit XP, were really alpha quality stuff. However, in typical MS Fashion, each revision just gets better and better. Still, I think the need for this product is overstated. Why is that?
Itanium is aimed squarely at the hideously overpriced Sun e450 and up lines of hardware. If you are Intel, you're not going to get hardcore Solaris shops moving to Windows Adv Server, and Windows DataCenter. This brings us to....
Linux. For the record, I found TurboLinux was the company to produce a usable OS for Itanium, followed by Suse, and then Redhat, this has resulted in:
Resources. At this point. Redhat's Distro seems to be the best on Itanium, giving them a leg up on the Real Prize, McKinley. However, porting apps to the Itanium hasn't been as easy as just treating it as yet another 64bit CPU.
Less Talk, More Beer.
The benchmarks you're referring to (the ones that placed an Itanium at a slower speed than Pentium III's or Pentium 4's) were running 32-bit code, not native 64-bit code. Intel's Itanium processor family (IA-64) are backwards compatible with their Pentium family (IA-32).. in other words, it can execute the code without any on-the-fly emulation or translation.
The problem with this is that apperently Itanium's implementation of the IA-32 execution unit is shoddy (and thus, slow). However, code written to the native IA-64 spec (which is what this release of Windows 2000 Advanced Server is) should perform MUCH faster.
Besides, an important thing to remember about Quake III is that it's not the CPU that matters really, it's the graphics card.
Once more IA-64 binaries are released I think the benefits of the architecture will become clearer. (Hopefully! I'm not saying Intel can do no wrong, but basing your assessment of their processor on it's EMULATION (basically) of IA-32 is totally off-base-- IA-64 is it's native, preferred mode. IA-32 is just there to make transitioning easier.)
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
originally did.
SGI was the first "mainstream" vendor to go
with a 64-bit OS (and it still has 32-bit-mode
and 64-bit-mode executables. DEC was next with
OSF/1 (later renamed Digital UNIX), and eventually VMS. IBM and Sun came later -- about the same
time as Linux (for Alpha and then for MIPS).
IMNHO, there was a very good reason Intel made
such an investment into the IA-64 port of Linux:
so that they could be sure there would be an OS
for it by the time it came on the market!
MS is a latecomer for that (currently have Linux
and two other UNIX ports that I know of with 64-bit support for IA-64).
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
What are you talking about? Windows is no less than the *third* OS out the door. HP-UX has been out on Itanum for several months, and Linux works just fine as well (I am currently logged into one of each).
I don't know what vendors who sell HP-UX based software are doing right now, but Debian GNU/Linux has ported a very large number of packages to IA-64 and is planning on releasing it at some point not to far from now. (you can install it from Testing and Unstable already).
Major developers know what's out there, it's only you who is in the dark.
(may or may not be the opinions of my employer, I don't speak for them)
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
duh
The big bonus is that you can access a lot more memory. A lot of databases are larger than 2GB, which means they cannot be loaded into RAM on a 32-bit system (well, 3GB if you play some tricks). Since disk access is on the order of 1000 times slower than RAM access, if you can load your 12GB database into RAM and query it from there, you should see significant performance improvements.
For editing WordPerfect documents, it's probably not that significant. :)
microsoft wanted to be sure everyone could see this:
h tml
http://homepage.mac.com/jcarusone/iMovieTheater2.
_f
The Velocity Engine can work on up to 128 bits at a time. What it's actually doing is SIMD work on chunks of data (4 chunks of 32-bit data). A lot like MMX instructions on Pentiums.
we could crash Windows with only 16 bits. None of this namby-pamby 64 bit stuff. No sir. We used to say, "look at me, I'm crashing with a segmented memory model!" And you know what? It was good enough for us and we liked it.
This new generation doesn't know how to crash Windows. No sir. They say, "oh, I couldn't possibly crash Windows without 64 bits, oh no." Wimps. All of 'em. Think bus bits grow on trees or something.
A man without a God is like a fish without a bicycle.
Right now 64bit computing is simply for high end workstations and servers.
Databases, for those of you who don't know are extreme memory hogs and 64 bit memory space is necessary for most large systems. NT or Linux this is a nice feature.
Video editing/rendering - having this much memory is nice + floating point = fast!
I know exxon will love them, geophysics isn't easy on 32 bit systems when utilizing holographic imagery and trying to produce maps of oil.
Microsoft just has an easy interface for how things work. 64 bit in some form or fashion has been aroiund for a while in solaris, again mainly for a server os. Irix has had it, and again they're for the graphics/producing bit.
SO NT will just fill it's niche.
I have no idea what good linux on itanium is. can only get mysql to go so quick, pgsql doesn't support 64 bit as far as i know and not much for high end graphics. May be good for a rendering farm i guess?
Atleast with SGI & NT/XP/2k you got lots of visualization, data manipulation, mapping and extrapolation type applications. Sun has its share.
So i don't know why people dis it. You aren't going to run Office on the sucker and if you do who cares if its on par with a PIII, a PIII is still fast emulated or not.
Its just nice to know 64 bits is around the corner. With memory and CPU prices falling through the roof its only a matter of time before consumers (gamers / coders and tech heads) upgrade to 64 bit systems.
Be it linux, solaris, irix or not.
Sorry, 2GB of memory is nothing. I'm working with calculations that use about 4GB of disk space to hold interim values. If I could fit them all in ram, I might actually get some performence out of the x86 boxes. And those are small calculations.
More directly, a 64 bit processor moves twice as much data around as a 32 bit processor, assuming all bits are significant. It's worth noting that an IEEE double precision number is 8 bytes (that's 64 bits) of strorage, and so a 64 bit procesor can load, add etc a double precision FP number in one operation. That helps a lot.
It's not going to be moticable for most people, but if your doing serious calculations, then it wil show.
That's what we asked when we went to 32 bits. The answer is, you can address more memory, and have more memory bandwidth. Note many grapics cards these days have 128 bit architectures.
Real world benifits? Depends on the Application and OS. Usually Databases and big imaging applications see benifits first. And remember, many machines have been 64 bits for years, Intel and Microsoft are late to this party.
I understand that when the AS400 (basically database machine) line went from 48 bit CISC to 64 bit RISC chips several years back there were significant benifits in uptime, of all things. Seems the AS400/iSeries Single Level Store memory & storage management scheme requres a unique id for each object in memory. Bigger CPU words meant more (2 to the 12th?) id numbers were available. So, reboots to reset the counter for temporary objects were now needed only (all other things equal which they weren't) 1/2^12 as often. That's a big benifit for big iron.
If it does FP in software, how the hell does an 800MHz Itanium achieve 711 SpecFP? Yes, some operations have to be broken down into simpler ones, but you're implying they're all emulated using integer operations... Bullshit!
They don't. The problem for Intel is that Itanium's performance on everything except floating-point intensive applications is TERRIBLE. Itanium's SpecInt number is well below 400 in any configuration, which is slower than any other PC-class CPU available today. Itanium is much better on SpecFP, although it remains to be seen how good it is on REAL floating point applications.
Itanium, and in fact the entire IA64 architecture, is a disaster. They bet the company on the wrong technology*. Intel will probably survive just because their marketing machine will persuade clueless corporate buyers to take the chip.
* The numbers don't lie: for most applications, all the explicit parallelism, speculative operations, compiler engineering and transistor count in the world can't compensate for not having a real speculating, out-of-order core.
btw, it seems they are reconsidering their decision to close it down...
karma capped
It's a server. A big server. And hosting customers will DEMAND we move them from a large number of SMP boxes to one giant 64 bit server. Collapse a bunch of boxes down. OK so far so good. Reduce labor costs by reducing the number of servers though most of our metrics are based on the ratio of end users or accounts to boxes not the number of boxes. So lets say that Siebel rewrites their application for 64 bits and we run it. Let's say customer X now runs one giant instance of a DB on it or one GIANT authentication server/LDAP machine. All I've got to say is
Holy single fucking point of failure Batman!
An Intel box as big as a huge ass Sun or a RS/6k-S80 will cost at least as much to support and twice as much to harden for security.
Not a critcism just a fact - we'll have to reshape all of our SLAs to reflect the unreliability inherent with consolidation.
the Linux kernel already runs on IA64. In the article it mentions that several distributions have been ported to the Itanium processor already.
If you look on Redhat's FTP sites, you can see the IA64 subdirectories right next to the i386 ones.
That's gonna ROCK when 64Bits hits mainstream (i.e. WindowsXP workstation 64bits maybe?) with dual/quad/octal slege/claw-hammer (or whatever that 64bits chip is names) ;)
:)
Future looks cool. As long as it's not too far
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Easy. Windows Advanced XP Server is a 64 bit compilation of a 32 bit patch to a 16 bit GUI running on an 8 bit operating system designed for a 4 bit processor created by a 2 bit company who cannot stand 1 bit of competition. Although I will point out that the NT and XP lines were 32bit from the getgo. Windows 9x on the other hand, yes, it's a 32 bit layer over a 16 bit kernal. Except for ME, which does away with the dos bootstrap.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
4 gigabytes should be enough for anybody.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Alpha running in 32-bit mode is NOT the same as x86. FX32 translated x86 binaries into 32-bit Alpha binaries.
It's technically true that Itanium doesn't use emulation or translation to run x86 code ... but they SHOULD have, because Itanium runs that code so slowly, it would probably have been faster if they'd used software emulation.
If you look at the Spec numbers, the benefits of the architecture are already pretty clear: runs great on nice predictable toy floating point benchmarks (SpecFP), complete DOG on everything else (SpecInt). Itanium's SpecInt numbers (400) are the worst of any recently released desktop CPU. Any Athlon or Pentium 4 will blow away Itanium's performance for non-FP stuff (which includes servers). And let's not even start talking about PRICE/performance.
I'm talking about Spec benchmarks compiled for IA64, if that's not clear. Done by Intel's engineers using their own compiler.
I'll run it on my nonexistant IA64 machine!
Wow...you didn't even need to read the article to figure this one out - it was in the title, of all places:
Windows Reaches 64-Bits, For OEMs
OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer. That leads me to believe that they'll be shipping 64-bit Windows on 64-bit machines. But then, you can't flame someone for doing that...
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
I was gonna ask, glad I read the reply. ;) Very interesting, considering the way the architecture is designed, I can't imagine how they could wring poor performance out of their code unless their compiler wasn't designed to emit the correct instruction sequences. IA-64, if you read the programming manuals, is very compiler-centric-- specifically, the compiler has to order sequences of operations to best take advantage of predication and other CPU features. This is different from IA-32, where instruction sequences CAN matter, but aren't usually fine tuned on the scale IA-64 would require.
Still, this is their first iteration of the new architecture-- I'm sure it'll take time to re-engineer it so they can squeeze the performance out of it that we expect.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
This is definately newsworth to see a version of Windows ported to a 64 bit implementation. Nothing is as trivial as just porting the core/kernel. Just ask Sun how well Solaris 2.6 went.
:-)
This leads to a couple of side question: How are the Linux and BSD IA-64 ports doing? I heard something about both of them awhile back. Both camps reported stuff is going well with kernels and compilers running but then the news just died away. Anything new an interesting to report? I would be interested in how much bloat going to a pure 64 bit kernel actually is.
Didn't Intel claim that the Pentium is a 64 bit processor? Where are the 64 bit ports? *shock* Does this mean that Intel wasn't exactly truthful?
I've read the manuals, and I've talked to a number of CPU architects and compiler writers. They have no trouble believing how hard it is to get good performance out of the IA64 architecture.
The fundamental problem is that IA64 is an in-order design. Your code hums along, does a load from memory, misses in the cache --- and everything stops until that value comes in. In an out-of-order machine (every other high performance CPU since the Pentium Pro in 1995), while it's waiting for that value to come in from memory, it will be executing other instructions that technically are supposed to happen AFTER the load, but don't actually depend on its value.
The IA64 was supposed to get around this problem by providing speculative loads with alias masks and other tricks so the compiler could hoist the load and perform it super-early, long before the value was needed, so any delay due to cache miss would not impact execution. Intel's big bet was that this would make out-of-order execution unnecessary. They lost the bet, for two reasons: 1) real programs (as opposed to toy benchmarks) are too unpredictable. There just isn't enough information available at compile time to decide what can and should be loaded early, which order instructions should go in, etc. The decisions have to be made at run time by the CPU itself. 2) The cost of out-of-order execution was overestimated. In the last five years we've been able to build really big horrible superscalar out of order cores with really fast cycle times. OTOH, the Itanium's supposedly "simpler" core has a crap clock speed. Go figure.
95% of what you read about the IA64 architecture is marketing hype. Just because it's "new" and "different" doesn't make it better. In fact, on the numbers, it appears to be worse in most cases.
SpecFP benchmarks are relatively small programs, and it's not clear whether compilation techniques used on such programs scale up to larger applications. On the other hand, you are right that the Itanium will probably perform very well on small regular FP kernels like one finds in Photoshop. I would worry, however, about applications that have irregular control flow and/or irregular memory access patterns. Some 3D rendering tasks fall into this category.
The thing is that problems of the form "multiply matrices fast" are fairly easy to make fast. Vector units, reconfigurable units (including CPU-attached FPGAs and Stanford Imagine-style coprocessors), multiple CPU cores, lots of FP units, IRAM --- they all kick butt on these problems. Even with traditional designs, you'll notice that Athlon and Pentium 4 performance on these kinds of codes has been improving rapidly. Itanium's lead in these tasks can't be considered secure. And Amdahl's law suggests that terrible integer performance (very hard to fix having given up out-of-order execution) will strangle them even for FP-intensive applications, sooner or later.
So emulation slows down applications? Do applications compiled for Linux x86 even run on the IA64 version of Linux? Personally I though the whole backward compatibility thing was a good idea (within reason).
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Oh yeah, I probably don't need to point out that Intel is not marketing this chip as a Photoshop/games engine, which it might be good for. They're marketing it as a server chip, something it's spectacularly unsuited for.
OK, it is 64-bit which is slightly useful for some servers. But by the time 64-bit becomes really useful for many people, AMD will have Hammer/x86-64. That is a much better processor design, 64-bit, easy to port to (just a 64-bit stretch of x86 with a few sensible goodies like more registers), and for extra points will run x86 code incredibly fast! The last point ensures it will ship in volume and hence massively undercut any other 64-bit chip on price.
I disagree completely-- the programming manuals are FAR from marketing hype, and the amount of documentation Intel has put out to the public so far (and so far ahead of actually releasing any working silicon) shows their commitment to this architecture. You talk about having read the manuals and spoken to CPU architects, but you seem to have no grasp on the actual way a CPU works.
Out of order execution is HORRIBLE on performance-- you're right, CPU designers and compiler writers (and low level assembly developers) have found ways to eek out every bit of performance from current generation processors, but in an IN ORDER execution unit, all of this SPECULATION isn't needed.
Your example of a load from memory being missed in the cache killing everything else is outright wrong. It's the COMPILER's responsibility to order the instructions such that a cache miss shouldn't ever occur. One of the hallmarks of the design is in fact that instead of doing branch prediction, EVERY branch is taken (fail or pass), and when the result of the the comparison that affects that branch is known, the code is either already in the pipe or in fact already executing (since IA-64 binaries are output in such a way that as more pipelines are added, more code can be executed SIMULTANEOUSLY).
Your notion that there "isn't enough information available at compile time" is horseshit. If you know compiler writers that think along those lines, could you ask them when Visual Basic will quit sucking for me? Compilers can (and should) do multiple passes to gather all of the information they need, then write the most optimized and streamlined binary they can. This is in fact in the Intel documentation-- and even Intel admitted it will take time to get compilers to work as desired.
And if you knew anything about CPU's, you'd know clock speed means crap-- AMD's Athlon has a lower clock speed, but out-performs Intel's higher-clocked Pentium 4 CPU's. If the pipeline is shorter than any CPU on the market (and thus, instructions execute MUCH faster), then the cycle count is going to be irrelevent (or inaccurate) for comparing one CPU against another.
Again.. this is their FIRST release of the processor. You may be some anti-Intel / pro-AMD zealot, but take your preachy attitude elsewhere. I've pointed out that their current processor definately does not meet the performance people were expecting or hoping for-- but it takes TIME for an architecture to mature. Were you expecting it to out-perform everything on it's first day?
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
So, will we now have the two blue screens of death as they make room for dumping double the size variables?
What happens when the two blue screens of death toggling mechanism breaks? Will we get the magenta screen of tormented afterlife?
Yes, you can use predicated execution to avoid the need for some branches. But that only works for a few branches (where the branched-over code is a short inline block), nowhere near "all possible branches".
PS, EPIC is Intel-marketing speak. What you are talking about was called "predicated execution" long before Intel 'invented' it.
> I disagree completely-- the programming manuals are FAR from marketing > hype, and the amount of documentation Intel has put out to the public so far > (and so far ahead of actually releasing any working silicon) shows their
:-).
> commitment to this architecture.
Intel actually kept the details of the design secret until very late in the game. But anyway, when I wrote "most of what you read" I meant "most of what you read IN THE PRESS". Not a lot of people look at the programming manuals.
> It's the COMPILER's responsibility to order the instructions such that a cache > miss shouldn't ever occur.
You should go to college and take a computer architecture class. In that class you will learn why this is fundamentally impossible. It's like a driver trying to predict which traffic lights he will have to stop at before he even leaves the house.
> One of the hallmarks of the design is in fact that instead of doing branch\
> prediction, EVERY branch is taken (fail or pass)
This is called predicated execution and Intel did not invent it. It does help avoid some of the penalties of mispredicted branches, but it is not universally applicable. In many situations you still have to use real branches. Furthermore branches are just one of the things a compiler has to predict correctly for in-order execution to work well.
> Compilers can (and should) do multiple passes to gather all of the
> information they need, then write the most optimized and streamlined
> binary they can.
Sure, that is the goal. But in practice there are severe limits to the amount of information a compiler can get at compile time. It's all about predicting the future, and that's always hard and often fundamentally impossible. BTW, I just spent seven years working on my PhD on whole-program static analysis, which is all about this subject
I understand that clock speed isn't everything. I just bought an Athlon for that very reason. But a lot of the design choices in IA64 were made to *increase* the potential clock speed, so the fact that they weren't able to get the clock speed up anyway does not bode well for the architecture.
It will take time for the architecture to mature, but most of the bad decisions are already baked into the ISA (instruction set architecture). And of course AMD (and even the Pentium 4) aren't standing around waiting for IA64 to catch up.
I wasn't referring to any benchmarks, I was intending a sarcastic slam at Intel for rigging their P4 with a ridiculously long performence-killing 20 stage pipeline just so they could crank the clockspeed above what the AMD Athlon (with its much more rational 11 stage pipeline) can do. I guess I should have nixed the Quake3 comment that threw everyone. Intel has a minor marketing headache on their hands if anyone bothers to ask why the ridiculously expensive sub-GHz Itanium is a faster chip than the 2GHz P4.
AMD should bring up this point in their marketing, actually.
I'm betting on the AMD Hammer series (2H2002) over the second-generation Itaniums (McKinley?) regardless.
so will there be:
2*.dll
2*reboot
2*hot fix
2*service packs
2*the bloat
2*the suck
?
This
KILL M$. Limit them to the x86. Amd then just wait.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Nobody is saying Intel invented anything revolutionary (unless you're speaking of Intel claiming they designed this specific part of the system). EPIC is marketing speak though, but you're understating the importance it has-- current Itanium's only have I believe 1 or 2 pipelines, but because instructions are bundled together by the compiler to execute simultaneously, as more pipelines are added in future Itanium's, the performance will scale increasingly.
First gen Itanium? Sucks ass, I wouldn't buy one except to experiment on or develop with. But as future generations are fabbed, we'll start to see the performance shine. Ditto for compilers as they mature.
My money is with Intel's Itanium in the long run over AMD's 64-bit offering.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
My concern is for Sun and IBM. Many pro MS or standards concious IT managers only have sun boxen around because intel based servers can't handle huge loads and i/o like sun hardware can.
With IA64 many IT managers would love to switch their programming departments from c++/solaris systems to VB.net/W2k systems in the name of standards of course. Bussiness users are extremely conservative and they are the ones who are keeping intel processors in the majority of pc's sold. The Athlon is totally foreign in any corporate environment. They will continue to want to use intel based products and the IA64 will give them oppurtunity to do this. Now which OS will come default with any IA64 server purcahse? You guessed it, Windows 2k! Now if they can have an intel based server with a microsoft based operating system running their microsoft based VB.net or c#.net apps that can handle a solaris load, then they will have it made. %100 conformity.
Windows is getting alot more stable and with clustering and switches, downtime problems are going away. This will create more headaches for unix since corporations like to buy computer equipment from the same company. Which will include servers with Windows pre-installed of course.
http://saveie6.com/
My MCSE is what got me into the IT field as a pc helpdesk support tech. . Sure they wont teach you everything but I did learn the basics on what a network packet is and the 7 layers of the OSI model. I also use Linux as my main OS and know some c++/java programming so I am not a total mcse idiot but the certs are for getting your first IT job. They are not a replacement for experience or knowledge of course but they serve their purpose. They are also very common for system administrators or support professionals who are trained in other operating systems. If you have 3 years experience as a Jr. Novell Netware LAN admin and are applying for a NT admin job, then a MCSE certification can show an employer that you can use NT but you also have experience system administering as well. This can be very important in certain situations where you need to prove that you can work in a multi os environment.
:-)
What I hate are those cheap so-called "MCSE boot camp" and other computer-training ads in the local newspapers. They promise you 70k a year in a sort of get rich quick scheme. Many of the applicants are suckers who are mainly poor immigrants who currently work at low wage jobs. At least where I am in New York City. They apply for these 6 week programs which only teach you how to answer questions on the mcse exams. No actual administration or support training is provided. Then afterwards they pass and expect to make 60K a year. A few of them actually made it into the IT world because they had a college degree as well. Its these mcse's are the ones who truly know nothing. Most of them who know dick still work at their low wage jobs and their mcse's did not help.
However I went to a professional business institute (paid by my employer of course) and was a pc junkie since middle school and knew my stuff. I learned most of my computer knowledge from experience but I thank my mcse training school for giving me a foot in the door. A mcse might not make a great admin or programmer but would probably be an ideal candidate for an entry level help desk job.
http://saveie6.com/
Actually I come from the mainframe world, the AS/400 where 6 minutes of unplanned downtime a year are the exception. Lots of hardware is highly reliable and better yet coming down the pike with improved self monitoring.
It's the software that's a problem. A kernel panic on one of 12 NT servers is less of a problem than a kernel panic on 1 of 1 NT servers. A problematic security hole caused by yet another ubiquitous IIS or Active Server glitch is more of a problem from a change control perspective if all your users are on box. A big box that still uses NetBIOS over TCP and blasts a ton a crud thorough port 139 is probably easier to manage from a firewall perspective if what you want is to filter traffic from-to by address but attempting to mount a network IDS on the box will present correlation engine problems in the shear volume of false positives that an NT based solution will generate.
And so on.