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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a 64-bit standard: x86-64 (used in Athlon 64 and Opteron). There's another one too: G5.
But why does it need to be Windows-based? Maybe you should be pushing your vendors to provide support for other OSes, such as Linux, which runs on all these 64-bit architectures.
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.
You laugh, I laugh, and put my money on Opteron for my latest purchase, but...if you want pure single-processor floating point performance and don't need x86 compatability, then Itanium 2 is still worth a look (as is Power5 and the latest G5 chips).
It's the ultimate irony that Intel is getting spanked by the same lesson that other manufacturers have learned from Intel even back in the 486 era. Namely,
Subtle clue: It's not "Intel" that customers are locked into, it's "x86". (Likewise, it's not Microsoft, it's the Windows API.)"Provided by the management for your protection."
Why didn't you submit this news a week ago?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Itanium was not designed for the desktop, or even the standard server market.
Yes it absolutely was. itanium was designed to replace ia32, totally. They wanted itanium on everything from desktop to supercomputers.
the grand master plan was for itanium to take over the world, ia32 would die a horrible death and everyone would live happily ever after with a new, elegant architecture and forget the monstrosity ia32 ever existed.
intel saw what apple managed to pull off with the 68k -> ppc architecture migration, and enviously hoped to emulate them.
intel's own current marketing literature even promotes itanium2 as an entry-level server and workstation processor! delusional at best.
a.) Typical CAD mfg are Autodesk, Microstation etc. Most CAD operators only know these systems on a windows platform. As an employer it's easier to buy software which is mainstream that employees already know. Instead of training employees.
I realize that most CAD programs only run in Windows currently, which I why I suggested customers should put pressure on these vendors to support other platforms. It won't happen immediately, but if enough customers complain, it might. It's happened before for certain applications.
As for training employees, there's no training necessary. If they know CAD program X on Windows, they can use it on Linux too. It's not that different at the user level. The engineers where I work seem to have little trouble picking up GNOME or KDE on the systems here, even though they've never seen it before. No company ever complains about having to retrain employees for Office 2003 vs. Office XP, but this is always brought up for Linux for some reason, even though the difference is about as great.
Since when was ARM high performance? ARM is cheap, runs cool, doesn't use much power, and has a couple other advantages. But there is no way its big selling point is performance.
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.
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 *
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).
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