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?"

Comments

Re:It's all about the OS

[redbaron7]

Windows NT has been available on the Alpha for at least 6 years - I've had the installation CDs for at least that long!

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

Re:It's all about the OS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's all about the OS

[TheCrazyFinn]

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)

Re:Backwards compatibility

[Billly Gates]

Alpha failed due to back marketing and compaq taking over as well as NT leaving the alpha platform.

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. .Net is years behind of course so that will take time to catch back up. But its possible.

Your a slashdotter and you should know the least quality products typically become standard over supperior ones. Thats just part of the IT bussiness.

Re:Fail - Nobody ever got fired buying Intel

[jedidiah]

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.