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Intel Shifting 64-bit Plans
OS24Ever writes "News.com has an article stating that 'Intel plans to demonstrate a 64-bit revamp of its Xeon and Pentium processors in mid-February--an endorsement of a major rival's strategy and a troubling development for Intel's Itanium chip' Is this the end of Itanium?" Looks like the rumors were true.
Intel has already publicly admitted to having X86 processors with 64 bit extension in development. Also, take a look at microsoft, who refer to X86-64 as "64 bit extended architecture."
Everybody and his brother figured out long ago that Itanium is not something that will penetrate effectively into the desktop market. It's hot, expensive, incompatible, etc. It requires a ton of work to get code running smoothly on Itanium. Th only amazing thing is how long it took intel to admit that it had egg on its face!
Whatever, man. I have G5 and Itanium2 machines at my desk. The HP Itanium2 runs Linux and WinXP 64-bit edition (which came out last June). The Itanium2 (McKinley) is an old slow one that crushes the G5 easliy on everything (using Intel's compiler) by factors of 2-3x. The new Madison Itaniums are substantially faster (look at the SPEC CPU benchmarks). The Itanium is far superior to anything else out there, it just doesn't run x86 code all that fast, and the GNU compiler sucks on the Itanium because the optimzier cannot get the VLIW right. The Itanium is just ahead of its time. And most people are too stuck in the x86 mindset to even see it. CPU buyers lose as a result.
Andy Glew (the designer of the Pentium Pro) on EPIC vs. normal architectures:
"Yes, but the IA-64 EPIC is not a modern architecture -
it is a design by committee, with microarchitects who believed
religious dogma instead of thinking.
At least some modern microarchitectures have made optimization
easier than in their predecessors. Apart from some egregious
glass jaws (mea culpa), P6 was often less sensitive to optimization
than the P5. The compiler folks complained that their unoptimized
code often ran as fast as their optimized code.
AMD's K7 and K8 continue in this vein.
This is one of the reasons I jumped from Intel to AMD:
the Intel P6 is philosophically a lot closer to the AMD K7 and K8
than it is to the Intel Pentium 4 (Willamette, Prescott), or Itanium.
Pentium 4 is fragile, just like Itanium."