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Intel Plans A Common Socket For Xeon, Itanium
stonedonkey writes "According to EE Times, Intel is planning a common system platform for the Xeon and Itanium by 2007, "creating a unified 64-bit motherboard with a new, one-size-fits-all socket." Intel's Jason Waxman says , "It has been something that customers have been asking us for for a while now...the reseller [currently] has to have an inventory of both boxes on hand." Feeling the heat from the competition, cutting losses, or just friendly customer service?"
The Inquirer reported on something just like this nearly a year ago. Of course this is actually confirmed with a date, but the Inq still has a bit more information.
You still can't stick an AMD in there.
While it's nice to know that they're planning on doing something that will take away a few more headaches, whose to say that this will ever get out the door and to the consumers?
I imagine Intel wants a polite way to keep the Itanium on the books for very special applications and to save face. Zeon will, at least in the near future, be the processor of choice and a common socket will keep it from eclipsing the Itanic.
There might even be a chance that the market will change enough to want the Itanic, but not if they have to maintain specialized hardware for a currently very niche market.
LS
d) all of the above.
The Itanium is crap isn't it?
I choose AMD and VIA mini/nano-ITX whenever possible, voting with $.
And my vote is to try and support VIA's innovation whenever possible, they are the only ones with the guts to break with the safe economics of the current form factors.
At the rate Intel is keeping pace, by the time they get a 64-bit processor out with a unified socket, we'll be running Athlon 128's and dual dual core PowerMac G6's (also 128-bit)...sigh...
:D
Get with the pace, Intel, and get a consumer 64-bit processor out! That way we get your P4's for cheap
Glad to see that Intel is finally waking up and smelling the coffee.
Hammer will be released next year!
(year passes) Hammer will be released next year!
(year passes) Hammer will be released next year!
Eg: how does a system bootstrap itself from power on to the point where the OS is loaded? That's the job of the code in the BIOS (or OpenBoot, or equivalent). Do you believe that x86-32 BIOS code is going to work to get an Itanium CPU loading the OS? The only way you'll get a generic BIOS to work is if there's an opcode that will allow a jump to a given address in one CPU, whilst just incrementing the instruction pointer on the other.
Look at Athlon. The Athlon bus was designed so that you could, in theory, plug an Alpha into an Athlon board. How many boards were made available to do this? Zip (that I know of, anyway.)
Intel are desperate to increase sales of Itanic (typo deliberate ;) -- they're hoping that by doing this, the economies of scale will make Itanic more appealing. Sorry, Intel; I'd say that this is the beginning of the end. Your fortunes were built on backwards compatibility, and it looks like that's now the millstone around your neck, dragging Itanium down.
(Intel's processor is "Xeon". "Zeon" is something else entirely.)
My point exactly! I mean, we all know why they do that ;) (hint: $$$$$) but seriously it's annoying. By the way.. why was my post modded as offtopic?? I believe it's very ON topic! Mod me up or die goshdarnitall!
Linux with kernel panic...
MadPenguin.org
First, the lead-in on Slashdot is silly. Intel has been planning this for a while. Yes, it is good customer service. They're not "cutting their losses" and this move makes sense even if AMD were to fold up tomorrow.
It's just simply too expensive to develop two different motherboard sets when you could leverage the increasingly similar characteristics of high-end Xeon motherboards and Itanium motherboards.
Also silly is the end of the article suggesting that Itanium will take over the world any time in the reasonably distant future. This is a strawman will no doubt ignite a frenzy of Itanium hating from various people (yes, we've all heard it before, Itanium is dead, Linus hates it, etc.). Besides, it doesn't reflect Intel's current clearly stated strategy, which indicates that we'll have both architectures for a very long time.
I'd say, gearing down to a commodotized market.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
yea i still think intel sucks. if you ask me AMD will eventully beet out intel, AMD has got the 64 bit market allready and now that personal computers can run off 64 bit processors intel has got a some major competion. if they still cant get the 64 bit processors for home use then i think intel will loese a larg part of the market share
With Opterons coming in much less expensive than the Itaniums, moving to a common socket with the Xeons isn't going to help much.
On the other hand, with Opterons offering far better scalability and performance than Xeons, moving to a common socket with Itaniums isn't going to help out much.
Even on 2-way machines, Opterons show much better scalability than Xeons. As the number of CPUs increase, the Opteron architecture (when coupled with a supporting OS) allows it to shine more and more. With 8-way Opterons coming out fairly soon, Intel needs to come up with something fast - they're losing one of their most lucrative markets to AMD.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Yup, I sure wish P3s had stuck with good old socket 7. Nothing better than SIMMs.
When will we see the return of common sockets on the desktop and server for both intel and amd processors? I'm starting to get annoyed with having to pay attention.
Intel would only do this if saving money was more important to them than giving people a credible reason to buy Itaniums instead of Xeons... and I do believe that's the situation at this point in time. Not a good sign for the future of Itanium.
Dude, Intel's got it's own OpenFirmware like doohickey already for the Itanium, it's called EFI.
Anyway, it's really simple. The processors will assert different "core-type" lines, which will control which ROM is memory-mapped to the default EIP pointer at boot time. I mean, Intel processors already signal their allowed clocking speeds by pins right now. Hell, they're probably different in x86-32 and Itanium, so they could both "be active" all the time, jumping to the appropriate memory-mapped physical address (both of which would be mapped at power-on to their own ROMs) and there'd be no need for an option line.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Actually, the real question is how much longer Microsoft will support the Itanium. Remember when NT supported MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and x86? Actually, Microsoft only supports the Itanium in a very limited way. The OS, and a few server side apps, run native. But that's it. The desktop apps all run in emulation, as far as I can find out.
If it were up to intel, we would all be using 120W processors that don't do shit... Intel did this for 1 of 2 reasons.
1. resellers were getting extremely pissed
2. they could save engineering, production, maintenance costs.
In general businesses try to "segment" their market, and when you vertically own the market, it is in your best interest to "make" everything, including different socket types.
Fuck Intel, they are feeling the heat because the P4 is turning out to be a piece of shit and the Opteron is kicking ass and taking names.
Granted Opteron's marketshare is nowhere near that of Intel's because all the OEMs don't wanna piss Intel off, but the big boys (IBM, HPUX, SUN) are selling Opteron systems because they know there is money and value in it.
AMD has lots of processors that do both 32-bit and 64-bit. Problem is the number of different sockets out there. This means you need to change your motherboard everytime you switch from one socket to another - big expense and something that makes u think a lot about which socket u want.
Intel says...use our 64-bit procs and you won't need to change the socket. This is a marketing thing. I don't think there will be much of a performance difference if the socket is changed. But it makes things more convenient for the customer.
Now, if AMD had done this...they would have grabbed market share. It might still not be too late to unify the sockets...but then it looks like it will be more difficult for AMD given the differences in the processors available across their entire range.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
No they don't. But now they will.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Not that slaping together server hardware is that dificult (and I really don't know much about hardware design) but, wouldn't you want boards that are optimized for use with either Xeon OR Itanium? Wouldn't creating compatability on this hardware reduce its performance? Or is this a non-issue?
"Initial success, or total failure!"
remin8.com
And as a post pointed out next to mine, newer mainboards typically have plenty of other nice features.
If you're complaining about how much it costs to upgrade each time -- then don't. Especially these days, you really don't need the fastest and latest. I'm still using a 64MiB Radeon 8500 and I still don't see any compelling need to upgrade. (Although in my favor, I really don't care for Doom 3.)
What's an Itanium go for?
Last I checked, it was tens of thousands of dollars per chip, am I right?
Seriously - why would you want 128 bit addressing. Modern CPUs are already "128 bits" or more wide in many of the ways that count, such as SIMD registers and instructions. I'm not sure how many applications are working with data that would benefit from 128 bit wide integers and floats, but I'm going to make a guess at "not many."
The move to 64 bit addressing is being done mostly because we've run out of room on the 32 bit address space. I'm not dumb enough to say that we'll never run out of the 64 bit address space, but I think it's safe to say it'll take a fair darn while before we do. Remember that AMD's 64 bit CPUs only use 40 bit (or is it 48 bit?) physical addressing to provide support for terabytes of memory, so they've got quite a bit of headroom within the 64 bit address space.
Aren't those elements with one letter missing?
Xenon, Titanium... hmmm...
What next, the Intel Trontium? the Intel Kryton?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm sorry but saying Itanium is crap is just flamebait unless you present a decent argument. The Itanium isn't as crap as most people make out, sure it has it's flaws but that's mainly because it was overdesigned for the future. The later generations of Itanium have much improved.
If you want to support innovation remember it was a fairly gutsy thing to do dropping the legacy x86 hardware support from it. The cost performance-wise of maintaining support has impacted on every processor intel's built since early Pentiums.
Holy Shit! Someone else who's actually played Master of Orion? That can't be!
Just don't attack my planet with 1000 missle bases armed with scatter pack Xs, or I may have to send my doom star armed with multiple hundreds of heavy plasma cannons, and maybe a stellar converter or two, to blow you to bits (and yes, I'm aware I just mixed MOO with MOO II).
which will have been "ryptoff" AMD's processor...
There are many uses for a really large virtual address space. You can create common address spaces for large collections of computers and large computer networks. You can assign addresses to objects that are guaranteed to be globally unique. You can guarantee that an object's address will never be reused. You can memory map very large databases. You can move to a single-level unified address space for RAM and permanent storage.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
P4 and Xeons are pretty much same stuff, right... Both are x86 compatible, both (in theory, not yet) run X86-64 extensions. Itanium is something very different, it runs IA64 instuctions which are very incompatible with x86-64.
For me this looks like the last attempt to screw things up for AMD and x86-64 architecture in high-end workstations / servers.
Let's assume that you are a pretty big boss in a normal company. Your company has decided to upgrade their High-End computers. You have basically two options:
Either you recommend 100% Intel Hardware that runs current 32-bit stuff fine and is ready to be upgraded or is even compatible with IA-64 stuff. x86-64 compliance is hardly mentioned in specs. If there even is such compatibility. 64-bit thing is important for future. Not probably yet, but in future. (Xeon/Itanium mixed platform)
or
"50% Intel compatible" AMD platform which runs current 32-bit stuff very well, but the x86-64 instruction set is non-compatible with Intels High-End IA-64 infrastructure. So only partial Intel compatibility, sounds bad... Thats like 50% Intel incompatible... (A64 / Opteron platform)
You are really going to have hard time convincing yourself and your even bigger bosses, that Non-Intel compatibility is good for your business. Mainly because Intel compatibility has been THE most important thing for last 15 years or so...
Then Intel just starts it's advertising/lobbying campaings and hopes that this is enough to turn the tide for them...
ps. if there are typos just blame the damn internet-cafe's german kezboard... somebody has swapped mz Z and Y.
Long ago, upgrading cpu with cpu upgrade kit from 386 to 486 and 486 to pentiums was quite a possible deal to boost an old machine up.
In 1997 I bought an Intel(!) mobo with Slot1/celeron buggy cpu. As was advertised these days, I hoped I will buy much better cpu some 2-3 years later instead of whole machine, because in past 15 years, as a developer I was buing a new machine for personal desktop every 2 years.
Unfortunately, no such upgrade was actually available, all "new" Intel processors were either completely different slot/socket or incompatible timig (mobo too slow). Again, in 3 years, I was forced to buy a new machine instead with some new stupid socket, which becomes obsolete today.
So, I do not believe Intel upgrade cpu/compatible cpu propaganda anymore. My new machine is AMD Opteron.
There you are, staring at me again.
The processors will assert different "core-type" lines, which will control which ROM is memory-mapped to the default EIP pointer at boot time.
Close. It would not make sense to have two or more ROM chips on the motherboard to support different architectures. So, what you do is take 1-3 lines from the processor or jumpers and connect them to the high order address lines on a larger capcity rom CHIP. 1 Line gives you two different architectures. 3 lines gives you 8 archs if you could ever get that many chip families in the same socket. Or take a chip about twice the capacity and use 4 select lines. Banks 0-8 of 16 would boot different processors and load microcode, chip specific code, and a java bytecode interpreter (not much in the BIOS needs to be very fast, except maybe the memory test). Then the whole top half of the ROM would be used for bytecode, with the 4 select lines being re-multiplexed as regular address lines once the firmware got to a certain point. Even better, a trivial change to the CPU cores could make them each start at different addresses in a jump table at the top of the ROM. Reserve the top 256 bytes as 16 different 16 byte locations. That should be more than enough for a jump instruction in any architecture, even with 64 bit opcodes with separate 64 bit addresses.
It really would be nice to have an industry standard processor bus which you could plug an intel, AMD, SPARC, or PowerPC chip into. It could be an interface with some optional pins. You could have a 128bit memory bus but only use half of it on some processors or motherboards. And you could have variable numbers of PCI-Express channels.
Failure to support different memory widths has been a traditional failing in PC motherboard designs. To keep it simple, consider the old 8 bit wide 30 pin SIMMS. Populating 5,6, or 7 of your 8 memory slots should have worked. In the case of 7, you would have had, say, 4MB of fast 32 bit memory, 2MB of medium speed 16 bit memory, and 1MB of slow 8 bit memory; you would use 4MB for code and the slower 3MB for cache or least recently used code pages (half way between ram and swap). I remember the 68020 family of processors was pretty good at handling this, there were lines the processor used to signal the requested width of the transfer and lines the external peripherals used to signal the actual width. These days with synchronous transfers the CPU would probably want to know the bus width of different memory banks in advance. Newer systems have similar issues with needing to install DIMMs in pairs to get full speed. It would be nice for people on limited budgets to be able to upgrade memory one bank at a time and the processor and motherboard at separate times. And do things like mix slow PC3200 RAM from your old motherboard and fast PC3200 RAM. Some minor OS improvements would be needed to allow the OS to recognize that not all memory is the same speed so slow memory shouldn't be used for speed critical pages. At some point, however, it is better to replace the whole CPU/memory/motherboard combination.
P4 and Xeons are pretty much same stuff, right... Both are x86 compatible
A Xeon is a P4 with extra cache. P4EE is just a repackaged Xeon.
You are really going to have hard time convincing yourself and your even bigger bosses, that Non-Intel compatibility is good for your business. Mainly because Intel compatibility has been THE most important thing for last 15 years or so... Then Intel just starts it's advertising/lobbying campaings and hopes that this is enough to turn the tide for them...
/. The assumption always seems to be that PHB's are soooo stupid about the technology that they oversee that they are easily swayed by advertising/lobbying campaigns. Of course the Intels of this world keep playing to this theme, too, so it can't be entirely discounted.
This theme is getting pretty annoying on
Frankly, if companies are stupid enough to get locked into this approach and it really does halt the sinking of the Itanic, I will have lost another small piece of already dwindled faith in American business leadership!
To a fair extent you can already do that. The processor bus width is independent of the address space width, and the SIMD units in modern processors are used for this sort of job.
I find the arguments of another poster here about cluster-wide shared address spaces etc much more interesting, though. I'm sure the crazy folks behind Plan 9 would have fun with the idea of a single global memory address space...
Intel has been in news recently with one story after another about how they missed most of their product launches this year. Today in fact the CEO sent a memo to the entire company telling them in short that they're a bunch of losers who have to work harder or there will be hell to pay.
Maybe they really don't have a fucking clue at Intel and what they really don't need is yet another pointless product variation and instead they should focus on getting their stuff right.
Intel is starting to look like a goddamn cereal company that's making up shit just to get more shelf space.
If you always keep them the same, eventually some dickhead will stick his new 1.5v processor into an old 5v/12v motherboard. You're gonna need a new motherboard anyway, unless your current one can do 10GHz.
To my mind, the ultimate weapon in MOO2 was probably the phasor. With sufficient tech (OK, with really uber, 'I already own the galaxy but I'm researching Hyper-Advanced Physics XXVIII to see if I can beat the Antaran Home Fleet with a Destroyer' tech), it miniaturised down to a base size and cost of 1, and got just about every mod. Picking the shield piercing modification in conjunction with the (armour piercing) Achilles Targeting Unit, adding autofire and compensating for the reduced accuracy with battle computers and rangemaster units and whatnot, you end up with a truly magnificent weapon. Not for use against Antarans, though - they use Damper Fields not shields, and xentronium is immune to Achilles' armour piercing effect, so your best bet there is probably to go for brute damage using maulers.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
With a hammer all sockets are common.
You don't need a lab to make mud.
Nobody uses it, nobody wants it, few people have ever even seen one. The industry desire to support it just ain't there. It is gonna die. I know a lot of folks who still run OpenVMS systems on the dead Alpha platform, who are scrambling to replace these long running. stable and reliable VMS systems with completely something else.
There exists a perception is that HP is trying to artificially create some use for the Itanium to justify all the work they invested in it with Intel, by making it the next generation OpenVMS platform.
None.... nada, zip, zilch, of the VMS folks I know are interested in even thinking of going there. They'd all rather let their trusty old VMS finish dying the rest of its death and they'll change to something they think to stand a better chance of future support... Like MS Windows systems on the low-end for most users, RS6000/AIX on the high end, and an extreme minority of this group is looking towards Linux and open source solutions.
I've been around this industry for a long time and have yet to lay my hands on, or even personnally see an Itanium box firsthand. The cold hard fact is that few people even care that it exists. Itanium == boondoggle.
VIA has had several lawsuits going with Intel over their P4 chipsets. VIA says it has a license from when it bought S3 (the video card company) and Intel says, no, hence the lawsuits. Also, Intel used to make most of its own motherboards and chipsets up until the PIII when they started licensing. The Taiwanese chewed them up on chipset and motherboard business and generally ignored the scope and letter of the licensing agreements. When Intel went with the P4, they really clamped down on the license.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
It won't die though because HP need it for the ports of VMS, NonStop and Tru64 (incorporating HP-UX).
Since killing off PA-RISC and Alpha (as Compaq) it has no other choice.
The color A69D78 makes headers and links nearly unreadable. Does anybody else feel the same?
You notice they are only getting a common socket, NOT a common motherboard. I think this fits into Intel's new numbering scheme. Motherboards for Itanium and Xeon will have huge long numbers that are difficult to tell apart. That way if you buy the wrong one, it will fry both the motherboard and processor, forcing you to buy new ones, increasing Intel's buisness AND marketshare on paper. Now is it so hard to understand?
This sounds like Intel's Overdrive functionality that came on some 486 mbs...it had that extra socket that I *think* would take an early Pentium chip (or was it something special?) and would get you an effective speed boost without replacing your machine. I remember seeing a fair number of these mbs, but I don't remember if Intel even shipped anything to put in it.
I wonder if it backfired on them at all, I know a friend of mine had a mb with it and by the time Pentiums were all the rage he still had this 486 mb with this extra space that was nothing but promises and hype. I think he ended up getting an AMD-based machine because he was so angry at Intel.
Would you like to run a 3.4 Ghz processor on a 100MHz bus?? Vanilla IDE (no 33 Mhz bus, no ultra) Yech!
Maybe in the future there'll be some kind of serial optical interface that could last for 5-6 years, but I'm sure that's a long way off.
The amount of abject ignorance on display in this thread is staggering, even for Slashdot. Just to hit a quick list of misconceptions and misanalysis:
a) A unified Xeon/Itanium socket for Tukwila has been on Intel's official roadmap for at least a year now, and obviously has been in the works for much longer. This is not news and indeed Intel has been hyping the hell out of it for some time now.
b) The point of this is not to somehow "retire" Itanium (what, by giving Itanium customers the option to "upgrade" to Xeon??) but to drive it into the mainstream by dramatically lowering platform costs. Intel claims Itanium will get 2x the performance on the same socket as Xeon in 2007. Obviously this will depend on the workload, but with Tukwila going against an dual-core MPU based on the ancient NetBurst core, it's not unlikely either. Of course the reason to stay x86 will be for binary compatability, but in many if not most server situations IA-32 EL on Tukwila should provide better x86 performance than the top end Xeon. The point of a unified socket is to phase out Xeon, not Itanium.
Meanwhile, Slashdot has managed to miss today's announcement that the likely future fastest supercomputer in the world will be running Linux. Seems like a slam dunk, right? Linux running the fastest single-image computer in the world? What's the catch? It's running on Itanium, of course.
Must be tough trying to come up with a negative spin on that one. From the but-if-it-was-opteron-it-would-cost-$100,000-less dept., perhaps??
Intel recently announced that by 2009 their soon-to-be unified socket architecture would be split into sockets and arrays again to satisfy the need of manufacturers to force customer upgrades.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
...about the general I.T. industry as a whole. And he's right - there exists no major apps that require an Itanium machine, and no ISV's are specifically targeting that platform either. They know better than to try to be pioneers for that platform. As far as the 'VMS' industry, that doesn't really exist anymore, it's only slightly more alive than the HP3000/MPE platform!!!. Curiously though, I know of far greater number of currently running VMS systems, in government and law enforcement use, that I know of any Itanium system. In fact I've never seen an Itanium machine either. Do they actually exist? (That's a joke. I have seen them advertised on the web.) If they do, I doubt they'll ever have any greater impact on the real world than did Windows NT on the MIPS or Alpha processors. Intel really ought to admit defeat, cut their losses and just drop the processor since if it hasn't caught the attention of ISVs by now, it never will. The window of opportunity for them to save face has already passed. A pig in a prom dress and lipstick is still a pig.
we have a pair of them and it works wonders. the system is very good design that the entire system is very easy to service (swap everything from pci boards, memory boards, processors, management, etc.) and of course good in the reliability and stability side.
the primary feature is reliability, manageability, and servicability. speed is secondary in these systems.
for opterons, their processors are good but i am still doubting on the entire platform (but it is slowly fading away.) i coudn't just buy a server because it is fast without much consideration into servicability, stability and manageability of the system.
by combining the xeon and itanium2 product lines, they will be able to increase these factors more. the resources will now be bigger to validate in the two configurations and design will be much simplified. for example, if an oem manufacturer creates an fc hba, testing will be much faster and better. there may be a separate software code base for the xeon and itanium2. i have seen lots of good plans from intel (though some are still plans but some of them are maturing and i can't say them due to nda.)
in operating a datacenter, this will have huge benefits. if we will get spares, we will only get field replacable units (fru) for the server and we can practically interchange components with our system. this is cost saving but the greater advantage is allowing us to quickly place a server only due to faulty components as they are standardized. in the future, we can have a same server board and all components and spare cpus. aside from hardware efficiency, it will be better for management. the management system will not have to deal with different type of systems. faster fault detection and resolution without much overhead costs of purchasing all the enterprise products. and when deploying new applications, you can have your own internal validation for hardware and software knowing that you will have the same configuration throughout.
by doing this, intel stands to create better platforms realizing from the strengths of both processor architecture. hopefully they will be able to deliver it and even better as planned.
john
and to amd's demise right now, Microsoft just delayed their release of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP for x86-64 to mid 2005.
craig barett also created a memo on improving on engineering efficiencies in intel. he doesn't like what's happening right now.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
x86 compatability is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Anything new for Windows is likely to run on .NET, and hence be CPU-agnostic, as long as you have a working .NET runtime on your platform. Anything for *NIX that's important comes with source code (either it's open source, or it's a custom solution, and you're paying enough already for it to support whatever platform you choose). As long as it's 64-bit safe (which any modern app should be) you'll be fine. The only reason for x86 compatibility is legacy code which is no longer actively developed, and will probably run fast enough in emulation on a new machine (which is probably an order of magnitude or two faster than the current one).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
All of the posters above missed the punch line:
:D
Get with the pace, Intel, and get a consumer 64-bit processor out! That way we get your P4's for cheap
I totally agree with parent that we do not need consumer level 64-bit CPUs. We just don't. We won't for some time.
AMD64 has a hefty dose of marketing in it's existence. (While it's a damn good core for 32-bit apps as well!)
And while those G5s are jim-dandy, bear in mind that Apple as a smaller player has to make longer term architecture changes (and can only afford one single platform for workstations and servers alike), and that's why their 64-bitness came early.
(I agree with you, BTW).
If it's the best thing for the user, I don't really care why Intel does it, it's astill a good thing. If it's not the best thing for the user, I don't care why Intel is doing it, it's bad regardless of the motive.
So, the real question is, does it matter? I'm seeing good arguments on both sides.
[OTOH, I prefer AMD, anyway. Faster, less power, don't need a helicopter for a fan. more open...]
x86 compatability is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Anything new for Windows is likely to run on .NET, and hence be CPU-agnostic, as long as you have a working .NET runtime on your platform.
If you truly believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you in NYC.
OLE, COM, Java, "web services", and half a dozen other "magic bullet" technologies have been repeatedly sold over the years as the ultimate in portability.
I don't think you will *ever* see big-iron or even medium-iron running any type of Microsoft OS unless it's an x86 chipset. Microsoft has neither the skills, the mindset, or a clue about big iron shops.
Maybe in the future there'll be some kind of serial optical interface that could last for 5-6 years, but I'm sure that's a long way off.
Even then, unless the motherboard is completely passive, the chips at each end of the circuit would need to be upgraded. (And those are usually soldered to the motherboard... not exactly user-replacable.)
You are spot on with your analysis. I think the answer must be option 1 though. 2 can be ruled out because the Itanium has an insignificant market. 3 is a tautology for all enormous tech companies. And 4 is impossible :)
The reason Intel thinks they can use Xeon as a trojan horse for Itanic is Nocona, Intel's X86-64 clone of AMD's Opteron processor. Nocona will satisfy a lot of customers that are impressed by the promise of 64-bit computing but are too chickenshit to go with an AMD product. Once these folks already have a server with the proper socket an upgrade to the new processor will be a little easier.
HP isn't porting it in order to sell lots of Itanium chips, they're porting it so that long time customers can hang on for another 10 years or so.
HP has a vested interest in selling Itanium chips since their PA-RISC processor architecture is a significant component of the Itanium design... they were design parteners with Intel on this cpu. They're the only major player actually building servers around the chip anymore. Dell discontinues Itanium development over a year ago IBM made a couple models, but that was only for an experiment to test the waters, and my IBM rep says they've sold so few that a discontinuation announcement from them is imminent. HP and a few small-fish vendors are all that's left selling Itanium boxes.
All existing OpenVMS apps (the last generations, compiled for the Alpha cpu's instruction set, not even considering VAXen hardware here) will not execute on an Itanium cpu. The only thing they have in common are that they are both 64-bits, and both big-endian. That's where the similarity ends. All existing OpenVMS apps would need to be re-compiled to run under VMS-ported-to-Itanium-instruction-set. There will undoubtedly be much source code changes, and likely compiler/linker changes too done too. I doubt the few app vendors who are left supporting software written for OpenVMS are even interested in going anywhere near another hardware platform change again.
The stellar converter is pretty much only useful against antarans (see below). It ignores defensive specials and therefore ignores their damper field and, more importantly, the reflection field.
:)
:(
I'm still under the belief that, at normal levels of miniturization (say only a couple hyper advanced tech levels), the heavy plasma cannon gives the most bang/space. It's enveloping, so once you take down the enemy's shields (which will often be pretty pathetic, unless they're creative or picked a good shield), or if they lack shields (like anatarans with damper fields), they instantly do 4x damage. They may take double range penalties, but that's what both teleporters and simply using multiple hundreds of the things is to compensate for
I've never managed to get a phasor down to 1 space unit. I always try to end the game with still a positive score bonus for time.
Also, I don't know if they changed this in the patch or not (I frequently play unpatched MOO II), but my stellar converter with achilles targeting unit seems to ignore even xentronium (I use it on the antaran star fortress). Maybe that's some combination of the stellar converter's "ignore defensive specials" thing with the achilles targeting unit, or maybe that got changed in the patch.
I will say that I've actually managed to kill the star fortress in one hit using heavy plasma cannon; not too tough actually. Unfortunately, my doom star also died from the reflection