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Itanium Problems
webdev writes "An article in today's NYTimes (free but...) highlights some industry concerns over Itanium. The author suggests the normal "what's bad for Intel is bad for the computer industry". Anyone know the power consumption for IBM's 64 bit effort GPUL?"
I'd venture to say that IBM's processor uses little more power than other PowerPC CPUs. Doesn't it sport SOI and other technologies to limit heat production? Heck, for an--albeit moderately poor--example of this is IBMs 750FX processor vs. the P4. At the same clock speed, the 750FX would consume roughly one fourth the power of the P4.
The Political Programmer
AMD's x86-64 architecture will allow companies to upgrade individual parts of their software systems to 64-bit without having to replace everything else. That's the key to AMD's future success; it makes the migration path to 64-bit that much easier (and that much cheaper).
Itanium flopped before; chances are good it will flop again.
The Itanium relies heavily on exceedingly good compilers that will perform for the IA64 the same level of optimization that regular, on-the-fly predictive optimization do in RISC chips.
The main obstacle with this method is that Turing's theorem says static compile-time optimization will never work as well as dynamic optimization. This is because, roughly, the only way to guess what a program will do with a given set of input data is to execute it with its actual data set. Here is a link where a reader of The Register addressed this concern in 1999.
Is anyone aware of how well the limits predicting by Turing can apply to the compile-time IA64 algorithms?
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Saddest sentence in the whole article:
"There are other benefits for Hewlett-Packard. The Itanium allows the company to eliminate both of its current 64-bit chips -- the H.P. PA-RISC and Compaq Alpha. That alone should save the company $200 million to $400 million annually in development and manufacturing costs, according to Steven M. Milunovich, an analyst at Merrill Lynch."
Yeah, HP and Compaq have been fine stewards of their engineering legacy...
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Well, the steam generators don't have to be that big, actually. For example, there are steam locomotives in use which are about as powerful as similarly sized diesel locomotives, only their fuel consumption is a lot worse.
Anyway, you don't necessarily need steam either. There are those nuclear batteries used on spacecraft and shit like that. Terribly inefficient, but you get electricity from a nuclear reaction with no moving parts at all. And don't forget gas turbines, that many of the more modern nuclear powerstation designs are using. They can be a lot smaller than comparable steam generator systems. For example the Pebble bed modular reactor.