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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""
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.
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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You can download it from MSDN if you want a beta (you don't even have to be a subscriber), and it's near release.
The plural of box is boxes.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I call bullshit.
It was not an attempt to drop backwards compatibility, but rather an attempt to produce a product vastly superior to an x86 based design.
Itanium was not designed for the desktop, or even the standard server market. It was designed for number crunching, which it works quite well at.
Is a Cray XT3 backwards compatible with a Cray1 or even a YMP?
NO.
Same thing goes here. In fact Itanium was designed to compete with the likes of Cray. It was never, ever, designed with desktop in mind.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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
boxen /bok'sn/ (By analogy with VAXen) A fanciful plural of box
I wonder how one might use such a word
often encountered in the phrase "Unix boxen", used to describe
commodity Unix hardware.
OMG !!! just like the original post, it's a miracle. If it doesn't run windows anymore, that leave a unix family of OS. . . . idiot.
Of course, apple provided pretty good 68k emulation in their PPC OS so that you could run the old apps, and provided a scheme for "fat" binaries so that you could have one (bloated) app that would run on both architectures, protecting the legacy users as well. Microsoft, intel's biggest bed partner, neglected to provide these items and thus essentially guaranteed that itanic would crash and burn (or sink...) Of course, PPC is a RISC processor and the 68k is very RISClike so the 68k emulation was relatively trivial, while itanium is VLIW where modern x86 processors are somewhere between RISC and CISC. Itanium only provides significant speed improvements with the most effective of compilers, and 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 as a desktop processor and shot itself in the foot in terms of world domination. The only way they could have succeeded is if AMD did not exist or was completely incompetent. Neither is the case, so we can now simply say goodbye to itanic on the desktop.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
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?
Err you don't know what you are talking about.
The Athlon64 is totally BACKWARD compatible with the AthlonXP and Pentium processors, and will run all 32 bit x86 binaries just fine. It is NOT a 64 bit only cpu, but can run in TWO modes (32 and 64 bit) as well as running 32 bit binaries INSIDE of a 64 bit OS. The Athlon64 is a desktop version of the Opteron. The major difference between these two cpu's is the number of processors that can be connected together in an SMP system. (Opteron's are SMP enabled, Athlon64's are for single cpu systems.) Next time RTFM and engage brain before putting mouth in motion.