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Microsoft Drops Windows XP for Itanium
MBCook writes "According to an article on The Register, Microsoft has canceled the version of Windows XP for Intel's Itanium processor. They will continue to sell Windows Server 2003 for the Itanium in the high-end server market, but 'For the mainstream server and workstation markets, however, we believe we can best serve our customers needs with Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 Edition, and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, respectively.' So much for Itainum workstations running Windows, but then again the article notes that no major vendors actually sell Itanium workstations anymore."
you're over a week late with this "news""
Sound like its a good time to snag some bargain boxen!
Everyone is lowering or entirely dropping their level of support for the Itanium, and now with Intel's interest moving to a better 64-bit system, this is good for everyone except maybe Intel and those who bought Itanium's.
MS 1: No one is selling Itanium based desktops or workstations, only servers ... err ... wait, that's stupid
MS 2: Indeed
MS 1: Why are we trying to make a version of Windows XP for it then?
MS 2: Because
MS 1: Indeed, let's not bother with that
MS 2: Cool.
MS 1: Don't want to piss off Intel though, let's pretend that we'll keep Server 2003 running on Itanium and that we support it
MS 2: hehe yeah
Although this is old news I will say this move does make sense for Microsoft. The Itanium is a server based processor, Windows XP is a consumer and workstation based operating system. This move doesn't seem too horribly suprising.
When a company like Intel screws up this hard, it is just funny.
I forget what 8 was for.
Just one more giant ram into the hind end of Intel. Man, they took a beating last year, and here we are only 6 days into 2005, and Intel is shaping up to be the industry punching bag.
I hate to jump on the underdog bandwagon, but given the high price of Intel processors over the past couple decades, I'm glad to see it finally catching up to them, and in spades no less.
The sad thing is that AMD seems to be heading down the Intel road now and in another decade or two AMD will just be where Intel is now... offering overpriced processors, and we'll be rooting for whoever is eyeing AMD's chops at that point.
Why can't any company come in, clean up with good products at cheap prices and STAY THAT WAY? Why do they all have to get greedy in the end? This phenomenon is not constrained to the CPU market, of course, we see it every single day.
Microsoft was dropping Windows XP Period.
They've had it coming. Truth be told we're stuck with x86 the same way we're stuck with IPv4.
With Internet we at least have some reason to upgrade, however with x86 which is obsolete and has manydrawback, well it still works and we're still seeing some nice performance improvements. I think we might have to depart from x86 pretty soon as the clockspeeds can't be raised anymore. So now its either SMP or simply a different architecture, like G5 for instance.
I've been holding off on purchasing a system for years. Initially it sounded like Itinium (sp) would be the 64 bit standard. Hopefully there will be some type of 64 bit standard as there is a great need for 64 bit work stations. I am in the CAD/CAM business and ever since the demize of the Alpha we have been waiting on a good cheap 64 bit windows based platform.
I don't think this is a good sign for the Itanic, but I don't think anyone will be surprised. This may not be the end of the line for it, though. MS has only dropped their workstation version, not their server version.
The really interesting question is: will Linux be able to carry Itanic, now that MS is starting to leave it behind?
See what I've been reading.
And where the fuck is windows x86-64 edition?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Wasn't the Itanium project dropped as a whole? As far as I knew some important partners working with Intel pulled out and Itanium's were going to stop being produced.
It has a counterpart: the Humvee market. No, not the power aspect, we're talking windows here....it's the stupidity.
Official Slashbot dogma states that all corporations inevitably are, or will be, evil. Unless the corporation is Apple, Google, or IBM (but only AFTER they "embraced" Linux).
Intel dropped support for Alpha and MIPS
What? I thought Alpha was made by DEC... What support did Intel have for Alpha? You probably meant that Microsoft dropped support for Alpha and MIPS.
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After that version, Intel dropped support for Alpha and MIPS, and look what happened to them.
Actually, it was Microsoft that dropped Alpha, MIPS and PPC support after NT4.
I don't see it as a big issue, Itanium has always been targeted as a special use chip for servers and clusters, thats the only place that they have been selling. MS is wise to drop a desktop version of the os that would have met a non existent marked.. Instead MS can now focus on the AMD64 / Intel 64 hybrid version which is where the high end desktop market is more-likely to see growth.
I think linux and win 2003 server will share the server market.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
The Itanic was an arrogant move on Intel's part - to drop backwards compatibility.
AMD obviously took the right path here. Viva AMD!
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..is always sucky, because they make a damn mess, and have sharp edges.
Its got to happen at some point, this project has been a complete business failure for Intel...regardless of the pet project clusters and supercomputer projects, the number of shipped units is only a tiny tiny percentage of Intel's vision for this project, although I am sure many here will attempt to justify Itanium as a niche product.
The really interesting question is: will Linux be able to carry Itanic, now that MS is starting to leave it behind?
If there's isn't one already, I'm sure there will be a NetBSD port for it eventually. The Penguin isn't the be-all-end-all of free [as in beer] software that works you know...
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I'm sure there are a lot of posts already jeering at Intel, but the reality is that this is a shame.
If we had all put up with the one-time compatability issues, and made the painful switch to get it over with, we would be much better off. The itanium is a far more powerful processor than x64 by any objective measure. It is not burdened by backwards-compatability issues and was designed as a modern CPU from the ground up. The x64 chips out there now can still run ancient x86 instructions! What benefit is that except to add to the gate count (heat, cost, space) and cause roadblocks for the engineers?
I agree that x86 will be with us for a long time, but only insofar as we are tied to PCs. Game units have jumped on the IBM bandwagon, personal media players and other digital devices are probably still up for grabs. The Mac is of course non-x86 but it is not nor will it ever again be a mass-market product, nascent sub $500 headless units notwithstanding.
I have been dying for their supercomputer OS. Microsoft considers supercomputer OS . I really hope MS doesn't ditch that OS too. I have been speccing itanium clusters and they seem to fit my needs. I also can't wait for .Net to come to Itanium, I'm sure MS will write the best optimizing compiler.
"brxref
Actually to be clear:
-The alpha version limped along until Compaq stopped willing to help Microsoft support it.
-The MIPS version was discontinued after EVERY SINGLE MANUFACTURER of MIPS clone workstations stopped producing them (e.g. Netpower and friends). It's not particularly evil to stop producing software for nonexistent hardware. Don't bring up SGI - it never ran on SGI's.
yeah, i'm sure netbsd/ia64 will be enough to drive the entire market on its own.
Yeah, 'cept apparently HP has a contract with them requiring them to continue to produce Itania for as long as HP says they should. Sux to be Intel.
.
Then again, the contract probably doesn't say anything about them being really *good* chips....
The Alpha did well with people that needed it, ie those running VMS and Tru64, and customers still buy them. Compaq continued development on the Alpha as well. It was HP who killed Alpha, and is attempting to kill Tru64. VMS on the otherhand must be supported for at least 15 years if they want to keep all those big contracts, and they have said that they will. VMS is being ported to Itanium, last I heard it boots and will run a dir.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Companies are often started for other reasons, however when they become big, public and faceless, greed is the motivating factor. That's why monopoly prevention is as important. Capatalism works to leverege corperations greed against each other to benefit consumers. Only works if there's more than one player, however.
There is still a fairly solid market for Itaniums. HP will move HPUX and MPE customers (and Tru64 too?) gradually to the platform. Having Intel made processors (as opposed to PA-RISC and Alpha) means that servers can be cheaper and HP can get out of the Microprocessor development business. It may not be everything that HP and Intel hoped for, but it will still give some fairly solid life to the processor.
Custom, hands-free Linux installs. Instalinux
Maybe because the software they want to run is only available for Windows? In which case x86-64 is the right choice.
And
FreeBSD kinda supports it too.
Although who knows if it'll ever reach Tier 1 status now...
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I think this is about the point where the Itanic's keel snapped under the strain, and the front end quickly subsided beneath the waves. We'll be looking at the tail end for only a short while before it is gone too.
it's a valid word.
This just seems to be another iceberg to hit the Itanic.
You have to remember that in many pro fields, the software is limited to a few, or even single platform. Also it's not as simple as "find an alternative" often one simply doesn't exist. A half assed, kinda working but missing half the features, thing won't cut it, has to be all there. Sometimes, something you consider to be just trivial will be make or break.
We run into this with engineering apps all the time. They'll demand specific enviroments (as in OS, version, access privlidges, etc) that aren't what we want to use, but there's just no choice. It's take it or leave it, and the app is the only one of its kind that does what is needed.
Yeah, stupid typo. Thanks for catching it.
See what I've been reading.
Don't worry - they're doing a port of (drum roll please) Microsoft Linux!
Bingo. The quarter-to-quarter mentality is a product of this myopia, which has been called the Cult of Shareholder Value.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
sounds like Itanic and Linsux were made for each other.
Why didn't you submit this news a week ago?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Of course, you are right in that the final kill of Alpha came later on, but even Netcraft could see the way it seemed to be going.
If you actually read the definition, you would have realized that entry was not a plural for 'box'
It's not whether Linux maintains a port to it, it's whether that port will justify continuing to make the chip at all. NetBSD won't even register in that decision.
My guess is that Intel will try again with Itanium 3 and just rebadge it as the next generation Xeon.
Itanium was the in-the-future-better-technology-if-compilers-catch -up -and-everybody-ports-all-their-software-to-it ... maybe, that pretty much killed itself. The Register have been calling it the Itanic from pretty much day one. They are now entitled to a "I told you so".
Itanic was a good research project that they made the mistake of telling the marketing people about. It is very much like Intel's new Socket format (with the pins on the motherboard rather than the processor). It was designed to make intel's life easy at the expense of everybody else. Strangely everybody else didn't like this idea very much.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
As an assembler programmer, let me tell you that I find the EPIC architecture god damn fucking ugly. Sure, it's generations better than x86 cruft, but it's not nice. It's full of design mistakes, a fantastic example of 2nd system syndrome. I prefer the classic RISCs (Alpha, POWER, MIPS, you name them...). Those are clean and mean.
Support for NT on Alpha and no support for archs other then ia32 for Windows 2000 was pulled because relativly no one was buying PPC, MIPS or Alpha machines for Windows by the time it came to decide what 2k would run on. Compaq had very lively development cycles for Alpha until HP walked in.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Maybe because the software they want to run is only available for Windows?
I realize that; that's why I suggested putting pressure on them to provide versions for other OSes.
Vendor-customer relationships are not a one-way street, though many people these days seem to think they are.
I highly doubt any of them will be throwing good money at Itanium, and they will probably just drop HP if they feel they can't get better options.
So, has Netcraft confirmed the death of Itanic yet? If not, everyone else is off and even the captain admits the ship has sunk...
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Actually, Intel did own Alpha at the end.m l
See, for example, http://slashdot.org/articles/01/06/25/1359207.sht
Perhaps, but the Alpha team is engineering at AMD now...
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http://slashdot.org/submit.pl under my login:
2004-12-28 05:30:10 Microsoft drops Itanium Windows XP (IT,Microsoft) (rejected)
/. is irrelevant.
Itanium has 50-bit physical memory addressing and a 128-bit datapath.
Athlon 64 has 40-bit physical memory addressing and a 64-bit datapath.
G5 has a dual 36-bit multiplexed(both data and address on the same lines) interface
Which do you think is closest to 64-bits?
Maybe an IXP2100 or a cray chip is 64-bits, but no desktop IC is.
I read it as "Titanic" :)
cancel everything...
There is a 64-bit standard: x86-64 (used in Athlon 64 and Opteron). There's another one too: G5.
Not to mention DEC's Alpha, Sun's UltraSPARC, SGI's 64-bit MIPS stuff, IBM's Power line (not the same as PowerPC), and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Some of them were around well before PowerPC, let alone IA64 and X86-64.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Xeon and Itanium will share chipsets and sockets in a few years, I think 2006 or 2007.
Sometimes they legitimately are one way streets. In this case, the customer/market demanded x86 compatibility, and was unwilling to see Intel half way.
As a business, Intel's responsibility is to tune into reality, whatever that is. Looks like AMD beat them to it, and their stock price will reflect it.
The hardware vendors have extremely shabby support for it. Know why? It's in BETA. They won't even get close to being serious until it's officially released.
Vendors have always dragged their feet on new OS releases - remember when Win95 first came out? There was all sorts of isues with CD-Writers, sound cards, printers (Canon's 650 driver is STILL officially a beta!).
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Remember Bill Gates' public vision a few yeas ago about Windows everywhere? It looks like it is coming true.
...except Itanium.
Oh, and Alpha.
Oh, and PowerPC.
HP was a big fan of the Itanic when HP was still HP, and dumped their PA-RISC roadmap in the 90s for it. the thought was that they'd get Intel to carry most of the cost of developing and fabbing, they could swing the HP-UX and (RSC? -- brain fade on the old mainframe codeset line) software teams over to a common hardware architecture, and save money there, too. so HP joined in the party, hearty.
they actually got stronger into it when they got compaq, even though Intel and Samsung were the Alpha partners at that point.
woe betide them all when the first Itanic came out, and the performance sucked against PA-RISC, and the second and third generation silicon didn't get them in the MIPS game, either, as seen in the roadmap.
For a lot of reasons, AMD Opteron looks better and better every day to the former Itanic fans. they should keep an eye out for Power5 and Power6 as well, the IAM coalition would like more customers. AMD didn't lose sight of what the users want.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Netcraft confirms: Itanium is dying! - Where do you want to meme today?
so say we all
So, what exactly is the state of 64 bit Windows? There is still only beta support for AMD64, Itanium support is getting dropped.
Microsoft supposedly spends billions of dollars a year in R&D, and they are unable so support anything but the same chip architecture they have had for the past 15 years.
A company like Redhat or Suse, meanwhile, support virtually every major architecture available today, including the Mainframe and Power processors, and do it with a fraction of the resources and manpower available to Microsoft.
If Microsoft is unable to economically develop for other platforms, perhaps the company's cost structure is way out of line.
Come on, folks, you bash x86 architecture (and rigtfully so) and then you turn around and bash Intel for trying to break away from this architecture and do something wildly different and superior. Their only failure was that they haven't "bet the farm" on Itanium. If they did, we'd be running EPIC-architecture 64 bit systems by now. As things stand, the only two viable desktop choices are IBM/Motorola Power architecture (that's 64 bit from the ground up) and this old tired x86 architecture with 64-bit extensions duct taped to its side.
No, this just illustrates my point more. What I meant before is that many people these days act as if customers are beholden to the vendors, and have no choice but to go along with whatever the vendors want to do.
Intel saw Microsoft acting this way successfully, and they thought they could act the same way by pushing Itanium when no one really wanted it. They've learned the hard way that, when markets are working correctly, customers are the ones calling the shots, not vendors.
My point with these EDA programs is that if enough EDA software customers complained to these vendors, they'd release Linux versions of their software. But unlike the CPU situation where AMD gave people a choice, and they flocked to it, these customers need to stand up and speak out instead of waiting for things to happen.
I miss my Amiga.
Unfortunately Itanium suffers from a very very bad and unproven design. Moving optimizations to software was pure genious.... rolls eyes.
I think the intel engineers drank too much of the risc coolade and instead of promoting simplicity so they could add features like pipelines and branch predictions they instead moved those to software as well.
x86 has improved and their are worts all over it but it works.
Today's x86 processor just wrap x86 instructions to a risc core to execute.
IT works and it works quite well.
I would prefer to see Alpha re emerge but it aint going to happen. Its a shame really.
I am glad we are not stuck with epic and Itanium it would make writing assembly code and good compilers near impossible.
http://saveie6.com/
The really interesting question is: will Linux be able to carry Itanic, now that MS is starting to leave it behind?
Is there a compelling story for Itanic now? It's not x86 compatible in its native mode, right? So the Power 5/PowerPC would be a more appropriate platform for fast non-x86 linux users as its star is rising, while Itanic is fading away. There's a vibrant PPC Linux community.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
To be more specific, the 64-bit extensions are duct-taped to the 32-bit extensions that are duct-taped to the 16-bit instruction set. :->
a JIT recompiler to run x86 code on itanium would be too complicated for microsoft to get right, you know they'd botch it somehow. Thus, by not putting x86 compatibility into the chip itself (which is highly impractical given the difference in architecture) intel basically ensured that itanium had no chance to survive
Right - what's Microsoft's value proposition for supporting Itanic with an ia32 JIT recompilation emulator when x86-64 is real? Apple got it done because they owned the hardware and the operating system, so they had motivation. I can't even see why Bill Gates should care if Intel goes out of business.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
>> the number of shipped units is only a tiny tiny percentage of Intel's vision for this project
Not true. Itanium owns 20% of the Risc server market.
Just run linux with mono support not complete but you do have support.
And please note most super computers run linux 95% of the market. So if you require stable software on a supercomputer I think you better learn linux.
Oh, Linux is not good enough for that. HPUX/IA64 will carry the torch!
HPUX on IA64 always seemed like, to me, putting a fleet of barely functioning tanks on deck the Titanic. On top of the paying customers. (You decide which is which.)
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Well, thats true. And they are not going to complain about lack of Linux support unless there is a major business case for it. In the real world, its all about the business case - that must be there before everything else. Corporations do not care about Linux being 'cool'.
I guess everyone knew what you meant, but NT4 was actually produced by the other very large and widely despised company (actually that's a little bit unfair to Intel).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It is so common to support multiple processors
that I don't see why Windows can't do it.
I would imagine that they would have the majority of their code written in a language like C or C++ and that they could just set a compiler flag for the different processor.
I am sure that the gnu compiler will do it.
What if they compile Windows with the Gnu compiler.
Why not do it?
I know why they don't, because they have their own. They won't use anyone elses.
Another reason why open source rocks!
Or they could use the Diab compiler.
Seriously, if you have a real compiler company or organization there isn't that much to do to recompile code to work with a new operating system or a new processor as long as you maintain proper build standards and adhere to very comman methodologies that have been around for at least 20 years.
This just shows how the Windows built on quicksand development tools are of poor quality even for them.
This is a case of where antitrust would have helped them actually do something good. But because they use a compiler that they make themselves they can't seem to make it work for all processors.
Pretty damn stupid of them, if you ask me.
It really is to bad that there arent any more Itanic workstations to price compare to the new G5 iMac.
..... the Apple is a whole lot cheaper.
I get tired of seeing that Macs are more than Dell or HP, when in fact if you price out either Itanium work stations (this is only fair) aganst the G5 iMac, well
Apples to Oranges?
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
It seems like the efforts of the R&D are used more to pioneer new markets of untapped revenue. The idea being to market novelty - not really perfect any technology. Once the novelty has worn off, let some other vendor move in and perfect what they pioneered. Well, the desktop and Office apps are good and very standard. But it appears that Linux is catching up here. I mean, there's most stuff you need in the OpenOffice spreadsheet - it's not far away from Excel. But on the server side, they sell the concept of a server, not a rigorously developed server OS. Aside from the desktop, which I do use as my primary desktop for professional type tasks like bookkeeping and other business apps that are windows apps. But I've now found Linux to be a more secure way to access the web. I look back and marvel at the fact that I used to put my banck records and other private stuff on a Windows box that was connected to the web.
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
You're sorta ignoring the fact that Windows NT was never something one would call "popular" Alpha or MIPS (or PPC).
The 386 went from 16-bit to 32, taking all 16-bit apps with it, but there was also the very little known 80376, all 32-bit none of the 16-bit parts.
The same can be made of the Athlon64, simiar to the Itanium, being 64bit only. I know, that'd be a disaster, but now that we have binaries, linux binaries, and possibly windows, such a chip would be cheap, powerful, cool and welcome by some.
Would you buy a cheap laptop that will run AMD64 binaries real fast, but none of the 32-bit x86?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Right, and HPaq owns the Alpha, which is why:
A) They're pulling out of Itanium
B) You can still buy Alphaservers.
To be fair, PPC64 is not pure 64-bit from the ground up, it too is 64bit extensions to a 32-bit architecture (the processors commonly known as the G3 and G4 were only 32-bit, for example, and the exact same binary MacOSX runs on G5). This is made painfully aware by a lot of linux distros on PPC64, where if you fail to explicitly install the 64bit development utilities (or specify to use them at compile time), you'll end up with PPC32 binaries by default, which aside from linking into 64bit code or trying to do it as a kernel module, you'd never know the difference without running file against it. It is very much similar to the x86_64 to x86 relationship, with the nice distinction that it did start life as a 32-bit platform and only has legacy dating back to then, unlike x86_64 which continues legacy from the intel 8-bit computing days, which means a lot more strange quirks that no longer are optimal.
As far as Intel trying to 'bet the farm' to move the world to IA64, I can guarantee it wouldn't have worked no matter how hard Intel tried. Assume hypothetically that Intel had completely ditched x86 and stopped development and production of IA32 chips. At the time Itanium was ready, AMD had already established itself as a pretty viable solution, not as well respected in business, but certainly on the radar. Now when faced with replacement/upgrade of hardware solutions, companies see the poster-child they've grown up to love, Intel, unable to run their existing applications, and therefore a huge cost to migrate in terms of development. Meanwhile, the suboptimal AMD offers fresh, fast x86 processors. Intel's reputation at that point wasn't enough to offset the huge cost of a platform shift. I remember PentiumPro facing harsh criticism and some market problems due to it's slower execution of 16-bit code, and that was when AMD and Cyrix had pretty equal, small, low-budget marketshare.
Besides, Itanium wasn't exactly pure gold. It had strong points (good High Performance Computing mainly), it had weak points (not good at general workstation use, high volume servers, essentially uses that involve widely varying, unpredictable execution paths).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The really interesting question is: will Linux be able to carry Itanic, now that MS is starting to leave it behind?
Another question is: now that MS is dropping Windows for Itanium, will Intel contribute more free development tools for ia64 Linux and make more "investments" in Linux for Itanium? Since 1998, Intel has made many contributions to Linux for x86 and Itanium - I'm assuming much more than Alpha and MIPS have.
But even if they do, will enough Linux developers choose to develop for expensive Itanium workstations when cheap x86 workstations are "good enough." I think we'll see a lot more Itanium-specific Linux investments from Intel, but I don't know if Linux developers will invest more time in Itanium.
For the near future, it looks like Itanium workstations have Debian 3.0 and Red Hat Enterprise WS.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
when they make a black & white robosapein with advanced, sentient AI, minigun side-arms and *INEXPENSIVE* add-on servomechanical sentry satellite-bots. (SAY, thats alot of "S" sounds and "-" marks!)
DO NOT DOUBT THE POWER OF DUCT TAPE!!!
;)
Seriously, it's amazing what that stuff can do...I just wish I could get my hands on the military grade stuff...the kind of tape that is meant for patching bullet holes and doing minor airframe repairs to the helicopeter
How about having no pins on either motherboard nor CPU but instead have a "CPU-sized plastic square with pins through it" right between them? If you bend a pin you'll just have to replace the between-thingie.
Oh god. I'm gonna make MILLIONS.
Free as in mason.
For example, "high performance" in the automotive world means big displacement, turbochargers, big valves, and the like
That's because the 2010s oil crunch hasn't happened yet. "Performance" will come to mean miles per gallon for a given payload, and generator-braked vehicles such as the Honda Civic Hybrid will dominate for passenger and grocery payloads. And as oil prices go up, electricity prices will probably go up as well, making instructions per kWh a valid measure of performance. So Freaking What(tm) if each individual core is slow if you can Beowulf the shit out of them?
Itanium owns 20% of the Risc server market.
Nice troll, HP still sells a lot more PA-RISC chips than they do Itaniums. Hows that for a ROTFLMAO!
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Betamax had the same length tapes ( 180 minutes ) as everyone else.
A VHS T-160 tape has 8 hours in SLP mode. Record 20 episodes of your kids' animated series on one tape (provided you press pause when the commercial comes on). The Betamax L-750 tape only got up to 4.5 hours in its equivalent of SLP.
Vendor-customer relationships are not a one-way street, though many people these days seem to think they are.
If the customer is a residential user, how can the customer negotiate with a Big Corporate Vendor(tm) other than just through take it or leave it?
Microsoft has its Windows and Office cash cows to prop up the rest of the company. Now that the foreign counterparts to the LZW patent have expired, does Unisys have a cash cow left to prop up the Windows Datacenter market?
No, if Intel had bet the farm on Itanium, they would have developed a good model for executing x86 on it (JIT in firmware, perhaps). That way we could all be running Itanium chips emulating x86 (the way Transmeta does). Only instead of keeping the native instruction set proprietary like Transmeta, Intel preaches everybody to convert.
So once we all have Itanium chips we can slowly migrate to all EPIC instructions. Since all of the device manufacturers would have Itaniums it wouldn't be a problem to develop drivers. Once there is a good critical mass of drivers we can switch over the OS. Once the OS is running all native, any particular app can be run natively.
Note that this is exactly how the x86-64 migration will take place.
aQazaQa
You have it pretty much, 100% backwards. MS does not pioneer anything. They wait for some other company, standards group, or working body, to come up with pioneering ideas, implementations, business plans, and especially market share. MS then comes in, embraces and extends it; never getting anywhere near correct or perfect.
I never understood why MS claims they spend on R&D, but it's obvious that their idea of R&D is different from the rest of the tech world. I guess for MS, R&D = market surveys, web site development, and technology scouts to find other companies that actually do R&D, and have come up with new, innovative products. That way, they can buy the company, steal the IP, or simply force them out of the market.
We have an old Digital AlphaServer 1000A 4/233 we use as a file/print server in one of our offices, running Windows NT4 SP6a. I think it was bought in 1994 and hasn't been turned off since, with no downtime as far as I know. Say what you like about Digital, but they sure knew how to make machines that last. Jonathan
On the technet workshop I've been this week their roadmap showed that when SP1 for 2003 server is released it will be followed by a generic 64 bit 2003 server release and a generic 64 bit release for xp. This means that itanium, emt64, amd64 -opteron- will be surported by the same install.
I don't think MIPS or PPC ever even got service packs.. Microsoft used to make some MIPS machines themselves too. Alpha support continued up to sp6a and the release-candidates for win2k.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
But getting linux working on itanic was relatively easy... Intel helped port the kernel, gcc and glibc, and it still cost them a lot less than they paid MS to port windows... After the kernel was done, most userspace apps build just fine, itanic is just another 64bit architecture to linux, just like PPC64, MIPS64 or Alpha that linux has been running on for years.. A vast majority of opensource apps that run on linux are 64bit clean and porting them to itanic was literally just a recompile.
You can't do this with closed source vendors, you have to pay/bribe/blackmail them to support your new architecture. They won't do it on their own until you already have a large enough user base, and with the current commercial-dominated software world, the user base won't grow unless the apps are ported. So, your screwed... Even Intel and HP combined didn't have the cash to bribe enough software vendors.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
"...but then again the article notes that no major vendors actually sell Itanium workstations anymore."
And, no one in their right mind runs a Windows OS either.
the page you linked to does not give the plural of 'box' as 'boxes' anywhere.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
so they could add features like pipelines and branch predictions they instead moved those to software as well.
i hate to be the one to break it to you, but the Itanium has fully interlocked pipelines and not only branch prediction on the level of the pentiumIII/K7 but an ALAT as well, something that not even the P4 or K8 has.
fucking dumbass.
What the hell? The slashdot collective hive-mind doesn't speak with one voice?!?
The Slashdot user-base is made of bazillions of people (approximately). You can get MOST (but not all) of them to agree that "Linux is good". Anything beyond that, and all of the individual people have their own opinions.
Personally, I thought that the original Itanium concept was really nifty. Anybody who's been following it beyond the initial "The die is HOW large?" fiasco has been waiting for it to fail.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Which was a very affordable & fast architecture. HP has converted most of its unix systems to itanic in hopes of aborting any further arch updates.
However i think they are once again improving the stable & faast PA risc systems since HPUX 11i itanium still stinks
from what i can tell SGI is still on the itanium bandwaggon
.. is the worst. How many millions of dollars has your company spent on M$?
How many hours, weeks, years, have companies lost messing with M$ software?
Got Windows? Got hacked.
Considering even the corporate leaders of most nations have finally discovered Windows is wasteful, expensive, and even damaging to thier enterprises why the frell would anyone bother with Windows ever again?
There are simply better solutions. Obviously.
What he's saying is that perhaps there ought to be a 64 bit only Athlon64.
This question answers itself, though. Who remembers the 80376?
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
How does your thinking apply to the term "virii?" I've often thought that although "virus" applies both to computers and biological agents, they are really two very different things. Perhaps "virii," because it applies specifically to a computer concept as opposed to a biological disease, is a legitimate plural. Or is the use of "virus" strictly metaphorical, and only the accepted plural should be used? Perhaps its obsessive, but it can also be interesting and informative. The term "hacker," and how it gets used in the news and popular culture, for example.
And you didn't notice I used "Sound" where I should've put "It sounds?" If I knew this would get such a response, I would've thrown in the word "virii," too!
An "Economy" p275 with a single 1GHz POWER4+, 1GB RAM, 36G disk, 16 meg graphics adapter, and no optical drive is a mere $5,575 - bump it up to a 1.45GHz chip, 2 gigs of ram, a DVD drive, and a (sweet 1600x1200 20") TFT panel with a 128 meg card, double the price. Go for the dual-1.45 setup with 4 gigs of RAM and two HDDs and you're looking at a cool $15,993. Granted, that box will utterly spank just about anything else that you can fit under your desk, but it's just a little pricier than what Apple offers. Kind of like comparing an F2004 to an Enzo...both lust objects, but still totally different orders of magnitude.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
If I wanted to run code at 1/10th normal speed, I'd pick something out of a dumpster.
I actually said "Pioneer new markets of untapped revenue" - not "pioneer or develop new technology". They have a way of effectively packaging stuff that was invented by some obscure or out of favor group and delivering it via the greased channels that exist in whatever market is being worked. You are very astute in your observations. I still remember the documentary about the Xerox Palo Alto facility on PBS - it's played quite a bit. One of the lead developers or designers was ordered to show Steve Jobs everyhting - so he could use it in a new venture (Apple). History has shown it does not pay a software company to pioneer anything significant as it will simply be usurped by an organization with existing marketing channels to the core customer base. Doug Hettinger
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
IBM Power _architecture_ is 64 bit from the ground up. G3/4 processors were specifically castrated because the market wasn't ready for 64 bit. G5 is less castrated. Who knows, maybe sometime in the future we'll get the full blown multi-core IBM Power chips running in our Macs.
Which is duct-taped to 8-bit instruction set of Intel's 8088 processor.
I actually said "Pioneer new markets of untapped revenue" - not "pioneer or develop new technology".
Opps. So you did! Sorry about that. Sounds like we on the same page.
No sweat, I'm glad you clarified what I was trying to say.
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
...and hasn't been for a long time.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
this is slashdot dude. if you want to chat with intelligent people, try picking up your telephone.
I hate latin grammer! I was taught for years that splitting an infinitive in English, as in "to boldly go," was wrong. Much later I found out its because Victorian English scholars wanted English to follow Lain as much as possible, and the Latin infinitive doesn't have an equivalent of the word "to." A split infinitive is wrong only because its trickier for the pedants to translate into latin. So explain to me how latin plurals are appropriate, but Old English plaurals are only "antiquated?"