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What's Next in CPU Land after Itanium?

Posted by Cliff on from the is-intel-the-only-chip-maker-left dept.

"I work for a major research organization. Of late a lot of the normal big computer companies have been visiting and preaching the gospel of Itanium. My question to them, and to the assembled masses here at Slashdot is what happens next when Itanium is real? My world view is that Itanium based systems will become commodity products very quickly after good silicon is available in reasonable volume. At that point, why should one spend $8-10k for that hardware from the likes of HP, Compaq, Dell and others when one can build it for $2k (or even less)? In other words, has Intel finally done in most of their customers by obliterating all the other CPU choices (except IBM Power4 [& friends G4, et al] and AMD Hammer) and turned the remainder of the marketplace into raw commodity goods? Lest you defend the other CPUs... Sparc is dead, Sun doesn't have the money (more than US$1B we'll guess) to do another round. PA-RISC is done, as HP has given away the architecture group. MIPS lacks funding (and perhaps even the idea people at this point). Alpha is gone too (also because of the heavy investment problem no doubt). Most other CPUs don't have an installed base that makes any difference, especially in the high end computing world. So what's next? I don't like the single track future that Intel has just because it is a single track!"

5 of 541 comments (clear)

  1. What's after Itanium? That's easy by wrinkledshirt · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Anadium"

    That's probably only funny to chem majors.

    Okay, maybe not even chem majors.

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    Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...

  2. The newest chip will be called... by RobL3 · · Score: 4, Funny

    The Unobtainium

    It's release will follow the distribution pattern established by Transmeta.

  3. Some more SPARC news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I heard SPARC chips are so fucking scared of the multi-GHz x86 clones that they are running their instructions out of order! Some of the Sparc instructions think they can even hide in a delay slot (under a jump) so the x86 clones won't find them and kick their sorry out-of-date asses!

  4. Re:compilers by RollingThunder · · Score: 3, Funny

    I can code what I can because I stand on the compilers of giants?

  5. Re: Wrong math, was Re:compilers by Alan+Partridge · · Score: 3, Funny

    so let me get this straight, you're asserting that the SPEED OF LIGHT is 30cm per second?? has the whole world gone crazy here?

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    That was classic intercourse!