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Intel's Itanium 2: Succeed or Fail?
An anonymous reader writes "'Intel's most powerful processor ever has the ability to take on IBM, sink Sun, make or break HP, and crush or revive AMD,' says Fortune's David Kirkpatrick. But the 64-bit question is what happens to the heavyweight competition if Itanium 2 succeeds or fails?"
I've worked on 64-bit conversion projects for applications on HP-Unix, and it tends not be as trivial as it should be. I'd compare it to converting a 16 bit Windows app to 32-bit Windows. Yes, both should be trivial, but there are enough gotchas! On a per line of code, the Windows conversion was probably more involved, but then that was because it wasn't written as well - eg. assuming an "int" is 16 bits long.
RB
Um, Windows already runs on 64-bit hardware. If programmers use the typedef'd types instead of hardcoding pointer sizes, then the port should involve little more than a recompile.
The transition to Win32 was painful enough that the newer APIs are all written so as to make the next transition seamless. There may yet be a valuable crystal waiting inside the lodestone.
The proper plural of "Itanium" is probably Itania. HTH.
No. The change was made at the 386.
The 386 was 32bit.
ChiefArcher
Nope, even the lowly 386 was a 32bit processor. The 386 SX though had a 32bit core with a 16 bit data bus and a 24 bit memory bus.
Patriotism is the opium of the masses
NT Alpha is both a 32Bit version and has been EOL'd (Although it lasted longer than NT PPC).
Windows 64 is due out Real Soon now, and it's delay is likely at least half the reason the Athlon 64 has been pushed back.
Itanium 2 is going to have to make up for the pathetic performance of the first revision (Which seems to perform on par with a Via C3)
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
sorry but there is a Error on the frount page
Already, specialized 64-bit chips have taken over the computer game industry--Nintendo 64 and Sony's PlayStation2 both use versions of IBM's so-called Power chips.
WRONG both are MIPS cpus and the sony chip has 128 bit instuctions as well if you want to get picky
regards
John Jones
No, this is currently impossible as both CPUs would have to be 100% identical as not to die a horrible death. All computers today are synchronous which means everything must run at the same clockspeed. You could use two different CPUs inside asynchronous computers but they are the way of the future. If I remember correctly, there are a few cellphones built around the async principles. Not sure which though.
However, it would be possible if the other CPU was on a PCI extension card. Other architectures have been doing this for ages. You do however need specific drivers to use that card.
If IBM ends up ruling the high-end, the consumer may well see an offering. In this previous article quoted yesterday on /., the IBM PPC 970 - based on a scaled-down Power4 - may wind up in Apple's future desktop & portable offerings.
Alpha didn't have support for x86 anymore than PPC has support for 68K. They just had a good emulation system in software. Technically, "emulation" might be an understatment; they would dynamically translate the instructions, doing the work once for each block of code so programs ran faster the longer they ran.
Personally, I think that it was bad marketing and the loss of support from Microsoft (probably as a result of poor sales) that were the problem, not technical issues.
If Compaq decided to go with alpha and continued to pay Microsoft to finish Windows2k for it(beta 3 of w2k for alpha was finished!), then they would be alot more popular in the server market as well as cad market. It was failed marketing that killed it and not technical inferiority. Infact untill recently you could buy your own alpha for $900! I saw it on compaqs website and its designed for hobbiest. Unfortunately HP killed it/
If paladium fills everyones worse fears and an alpha for 2k that can beat a 4k intel box that is not drm crippled and supports both Linux and W2k as well as old x86 apps, then I and a million other people would be in!
Infact I bet dreamworks and pixar would probably be using alpha's on Linux right now rather then pentiumIv's if compaq or digital got their act together. My hope is if it fails, that Intel will revive the alpha since its the only thing that can truly stomp on the competition from HP, SUN, and IBM. They already have optimized compilers for it which is whats killing the itanium right now. Sadly software vendors are scared as hell of supporting the alpha thinking its dead which creates a self fullfilling prophecy aka os/2 and macos syndrome.
For marketing the alpha as purely a server platform might fix this syndrome untill it becomes more popular and then the vendors will come back. Linux/FreeBSD are already there with apache and sendmail and Microsoft was %98 done with the w2k with IIS and Exchange.
Your a slashdotter and you should know the least quality products typically become standard over supperior ones. Thats just part of the IT bussiness.
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The fact that a good compiler takes an inordinate amount of time to create for Itanium is bad for small businesses and free software developers. It's good for Intel, if they succeed, since it will change the game (no compatibility) and make them top dog. Hmmmm. Where have I seen this before? Oh, right, Microsoft (ie, embrace Java, extend to C#).
x86-64 will be very easy for compiler writers. My company's own compiler would take 6 weeks to port to x86-64, but an IA64 port would take person years.
Porting of apps isn't the real issue. The real issue is waiting for GOOD compilers for all the languages that are used by a given app. Only THEN can the app authors recompile and retest and rerelease. If the compilers aren't there, you are SOL, because running IA32 binaries on IA64 will be a dog.
Itanium is NOT ideally suitable for Linux.
The compiler requirements for Itanium are simply too high. Unless the GCC team has gotten some SERIOUS assistance from Intel, I would not expect the Itanium version of gcc to be good enough.
The real problem with Itanium is that it requires a remarkably better compiler.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
IA64 itself is not at all backwards compatible with IA32.
True... The IA64 instruction set is not backwards compatible with IA32. However the Itanium and Itanium 2 processors can run IA32 code in hardware. Its important to remember that distinction.
From the looks of things, they've dropped the hardware emulation altogether from the Itanium2, though it may still exist as a (mostly?) undocumented feature.
No it still exists and is well documented... just not used due to its exceptionally poor performance.
The 80286 was a 16 bit processor with a 24 bit address bus. Perhaps you were thinking of the 80386?