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SCO Releases Linux OS for Itanium 2
GreyPoopon writes "Computerworld has an article referring to SCO's announcement of Enterprise Linux for the Itanium 2. Base installation starts at $999 for up to four CPUs. My favorite quote: "With its new system, SCO is a little late to the Linux on Itanium 2 market." I would think being late would be the least of their worries right now. I personally consider this to be my daily dose of comedy. Newsfactor has a better article."
More information on SCO, it's lawsuit, the many boycotts against it and why they aren't exactly the ideal company can be found here.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
Umm, last I checked, a 64-bit processor doesn't give you a wider bus automatically. That's purely a function of the attached bus itself. In fact, in the RDRAM architecture, the bus is actually really *narrow*, it just runs at very high clock rates (IIRC, in the Ghz range these days, with packets that are 8 bytes wide). So, no bandwidth is probably not a key factor in the decision to buy an Itanium-based machine.
The odds are good they either want 1) really excellent floating point performance (something I hear the Itanium is good at), 2) better performing native apps, because, theoretically, the compiler can optimize better with more registers and the ability to statically schedule multiple operations simultaneously (although we'll see how that plays out in practice), or 3) the ability to access large amounts of RAM.
Note, the second point I listed is a bit of a red herring, since I'm not aware of any really good IA-64 compilers yet (other than maybe Intel's), and I'm sure the practice of optimizing for the IA-64 is still developing.