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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."
poster = troll
IBM only makes fun of the Itanium because doing so profits the power 5. They realise that the Opterot is not a competitor with the power 5 so they can laugh all the way to the bank.
All of this is just anti Itanium speach is AMD marketing fud. The AMD fud is that the Itanium is inneficient or a bad architecture or has huge dies that are costly to manufacture which is all AMD marketing crap. The Opteron is an outdated processor based on extending an obsolete 20 year old architecture. AMD and Intel should have cooperated and created a new architecture insteading of extending an obsolete instruction set. The only reason why you would want x86-64 is if your AMD. Extending the x86 architecture is the only way that AMD can have market leading influence.
The AMD people criticize the Itanium but the Itanium idea is absolutely correct. A new architecture would be preferable than a 20 year old architecture. Apple has shown that you can move from the 68000 which is better than x86 and move to a modern risc architecture like powerpc.
The Alpha engineers were given a tour of the Intel plant and when they were told the processor yields. They were shocked by how high the yield was. The yield on Intel wafer's is very good which knocks the myth that large dies are hard to make. Intel has absolutely incredible lithography and fabrication technology. Vastly superior than AMDs. If it weren't for state aid courtesy of Saxony AMD wouldn't be competing with Intel. The fact is you can't put your stock in AMD which is 1/10th the size of Intel and shouldn't be considered a competitor. Intel also owns all their plants unlike AMD which has to beg Saxony for a handout and beg IBM for some fabrication techniques like SOI.
Extending the x86 is like trying to cross a dead dog with a cheatah. The result is you get a dead mangy cat. The Opteron is not a revolutionary architecture and it only succeeds at the inneficiency of the Pentium 4. The Opteron is not the answer because it extends the x86 architecture. A new risc architecture could easily supplant the x86 one with emulation for backward compatability and be a much better solution than AMD-64. However, transitioning to a new architecture would have been better 15 years ago and much easier than trying to emulate the monolithic-skunk-dog-which-is-a-rancid-decaying-an d-dead-and stinks-to-hell-x86 soon to be x86-64 and if AMD succeeds AMD-x86-64.
Opterot is not the answer. x86 has been extended and gone through 5 or 6 generations and has so many layers and calcification that even a paleontologist couldn't classify them. The x86 is an archeological disaster unfit for teaching and not using. It is unkempt and unclean and should be exorcised by the local priest. Itanium is a new design and new is better than Opterot. A new better pc architecture benefits everyone except Sun and IBM and their outdated bigiron.