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HP Terminates Itanium Workstations
vincecate writes "The largest Itanium system maker,
HP, has terminated its Itanium workstations.
It seems their workstation customers have spoken in favor of x64.
In related news, Intel expects to ship
over 100,000 Itaniums in all of 2004
while AMD is estimating
1.5 to 2 million AMD64 chips in Q4."
Makes me think about their technical vision
I AMD has caught up to intel a couple of times in the desktop market only to fall back again. Could this be the time that they leapfrog over Intel and be far and away leader in a market? One could only hope. In a tech world of dominate players (Intel, MS) its nice to see the underdog win with a superior product.
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
AMD deserves the win here for pushing 32 bit backwards compatibility, Intel had to and still is playing catch-up with them in this arena.
Good job AMD!
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
I guess because (for some moronic reason) AMD are "good guys" and Intel are "bad guys" we just have to get all giggly and rub their noses in it.
BFD. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Some products take off, some don't.
Itanium looks like a good architecture for transaction processing, at least on paper. Turns out the market was more interested in backwards compatibility.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Why doesn't Intel just get over the NIH syndrome and start fabbing the Alpha (proven design, existing software base, the geeks love it)... Don't they own the rights for it via some legal-fall out with Compaq?
- Friendly A.C.
Let me put it this way. I would not buy a server from HP anyway.
I don't think they will care. Most people in the business of buying servers seem to do. Comp... er, HP Proliants are probably the most popular Linux servers at the moment.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
What was Intel thinking?
An architecture switch breaking x86 ISA compatibility (i.e. emulation is noticeably slower than the original item) would put it on a level playing field with other 64-bit workstation/server-class chips, yet they never seemed to offer either world-beating design improvements or substantial price benefits, or appear as though they would in the future.
This looked like a loser from the first minute I saw it, and I obviously wasn't the only one: I mean, the chip has been "The Itanic" in Register parlance for years now.
Intel, for all their flaws, is a smart company with a lot of smart people working for it. I must just not be seeing the whole picture. They must have had some good reason not to have flushed this project years ago, right?
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
The interesting thing is 3 RISC chips were killed because of the threat of Intel - MIPS (well, at least in workstations, embedded lives on), Alpha, and PA-RISC. PA-RISC even had a technology that could be seen as the opposite of EPIC, instead of moving scheduling logic to the compiler, they actually moved some of the optimization the compiler could do to the chip itself, since it knew current state of the machine and the compiler couldn't. Just shows you what a bit of monopoly muscle can do I guess.
Has AMD finally proven that the x86 "standard" can produce truly 100% compatible CPUs, without Intel IP, after decades of doges and ruses, including MMX?
--
make install -not war
Is it just me, or does the article gloss over the fact that "EM64T" is actual a clone of the AMD64 architecture? Are intel's market-droids trying to brainwash people, or are people really that clueless to the fact that INTEL IS MAKIGN A CLONE OF AN AMD CHIP?
Give credit where credit is due.. EM64T is clone crap, and is signifigantly slower than the AMD chips.
The old junk is a constant overhead, but processor architectures keep getting bigger and more complex with or without the old junk. Processors are now so large that the old junk is a tiny percentage of the total logic.
All modern processors translate their user-visible instruction set on-the-fly into some other internal format anyway. The X86 ISA is just a kind of bytecode, and it's a relatively compact one at that. It's easier for compilers to generate than Itanium bytecodes, so it's not hard to see why X86 is still around.
I kind of doubt that X86 will ever get junked. Now that X86 has 64-bit addressing, there's little reason to create any new user-visible changes to the instruction set. Processors can continue to improve and change their internal architecture without bothering the users with silly implementation details.
The Itanium is a high-end workstation/server chip. ONLY. -- While the AMD64 architecture is AMD's entire product line right now. It's their desktop chip; it's their workstation chip; it's their server chip; hell, it's even their notebook/laptop chip.
Whoever submitted this article seems to think that every AMD64 sold is going to be going into the high-end server market. Either that, or he thinks that home users are buying Itaniums. Funny... I don't seem to recall ever seeing a laptop with an Itanium in it.
A more honest comparison would be the 800 series Opterons vs. Itaniums, the 200 series Opterons vs. Xeons, and Athlon64's vs. Pentium 4's.
/dev/random
x64's 64-bit mode fixes quite a few of the problems of x86 as well as giving you 64-bit support. For example, a number of useless old instructions are no longer supported (they still work in x86 mode of course). It increases the number of general purpose registers from 8 to 16. Using SSE2 to do floating point, you get a reasonable floating-point instruction set with 16 registers. If you squint a bit it looks like a decent instruction set which just happens to have a weird instruction encoding.
Yes, the decode stages are a pain (though trace cache helps), but in return you get significantly higher instruction density than competing RISC chips which helps with your instruction cache.
OTOH the IA-64 architecture was designed around unfounded implementation assumptions like "we won't be doing out-of-order execution". Sorry, WRONG. Sometimes polishing up old junk gives better results than designing completely new and differently broken junk.
Around here, you used to find all kinds of people complaining about the old kludgy x86 architecture and how the backwards compatibility placed terrible limitations on the CPUs and on software that runs on it.
Now, everyone jumped on the bandwagon spouting "what were they thinking? Trying to define a new architecture.. dumb asses!"
So, which is it?? I learned architecture and assembly on a Motorola 68k processor. So, the x86 stuff has always seemed kludgy to me. Have the problems been overcome, or do people just not care anymore?