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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."
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.
What's really sad is that Intel still insists that the Itanium really is a superior architecture, and fully plans to push it forward in the high-end computing space. They even point out that they've pushed out most of the other 64-bit competitors, leaving them #3 behind IBM's POWER and Sun's SPARC. Of course, this sounds pretty silly since the other competitors were HP's PA-RISC, which was dated and being phased out anyway, Alpha, which was being phased out intentionally in favor of Itanium because of HP's deal with Intel, and MIPS, which never did that well to begin with.
Personally, I think Intel is going to keep beating the Itanium dying horse as long as they can, while attempting to improve overall revenues by pushing into other markets such as cellphones, PDAs, and other mobile/low-power devices. I really don't see how Itanium can possibly succeed over IBM's POWER, though it may have a good chance against SPARC since Sun is floundering so badly.
Well, the Itanium still runs x86 instructions.
The problem with the Itanium is that it just requires too much compiler magic to make it work well.
It's kind of similar to the "software bloat" problem. Yeah, you could spend a couple of years optimizing a single piece of software, or you could just throw more hardware at it, for less money.
This is a crock of shit. CEO's, CFO's, etc. all have to have long-term investment strategies or the board won't even keep them around. It's not all about "right here, right now" in the corporate world. Most of the companies who have had that type of strategy are long gone (i.e. many dot com's).
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.
I'm sorry, but I simply haven't seen any evidence at all the Itanium is a superior architecture for real-world software. It entirely depends on the compiler optimizing everything for the CPU, but the problem as I understand it is that most software simply isn't written in such a way that the compiler can optimize it for this CPU; there's too much parallelism, and most software simply isn't written that way. Just a simple re-compile with Intel's compiler doesn't fix the problem; all the software must be written specifically for the processor's features.
This sounds like a very bad idea to me. To be successful, a processor needs to perform well with software that is commonly available for it.
Here's an analogy: suppose someone builds a really efficient car, that gets 100 mpg. However, it doesn't run on the same gasoline that everyone else's car uses. It runs on a special fuel, which requires a lot of time and energy to synthesize. Because of this, the price of the fuel is 10 times the price of gasoline. Obviously, the car isn't really efficient at all; the overall cost per mile of driving it will be much greater than regular cars, and there's no indication that the special fuel would get any cheaper. Who'd buy that car?
It may be true that certain highly specialized applications can take advantage of the Itanium's architecture, but Intel isn't going to make any money selling a tiny number of these processors to a tiny number of customers. Even worse, the economy of scale isn't there: if Intel doesn't make many of these CPUs, their price will be very high. The customers could do the same jobs using more of the less-efficient processors that the competitors sell; since these cost a small fraction of what the Itanium costs, they'll still come out ahead.
Highly specialized, highly priced products only succeed in the marketplace when there's no other, cheaper (though less efficient) way to do the job. Itanium is only good for highly parallel computing workloads, which can also be easily done with commodity processors, running in parallel. This is a formula for failure.
http://slashdot.org/submit.pl under my login:
2004-12-28 05:30:10 Microsoft drops Itanium Windows XP (IT,Microsoft) (rejected)
/. is irrelevant.
I call bullshit on you!
At least partially.
THe first round of epic (merced) was supposed to be a server processor, like the p6, with desktop parts trickling down, later. With the original plan, all current intel cpus should have been epic-based till now.
But the whole project was delayed and delayed, the compilers took ages to get running and AMD came rather unsuspected with the athlon, which resulted in the need quickly push the existing x86 design.
So the late epic designs werent significantly faster than x86 anymore, plus more expensive/higher power requiring. -> nobody wanted them.
If the itanium never was supposed to become a normal server&workstation processor, why do you think that they included a dedicated x86 processing core into the die?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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.
I think part of the problem is drivers. I have an Athlon 64 and are running the beta Windows XP 64 bit edition (dual booting with the 32 bit Windows XP) and while it seems to work all right, there are very few drivers for the platform. FI. my Matrox Parhelia is not supported, which means no dual/triple screen support and a screen update that *crawls*. There are lots of other devices that doesn't work as well + quite a few 32 bit programs that won't install.
So intel lost billions on the itanic. Big deal. Intel has billions in cash reserves even now as we speak... recover? AMD doesn't even Have a cash reserve. Intel doesn't need to 'recover' from the flop that was itanic, they need to recover from maketing/HR decisions that have left them leaderless and without a plan going forward. Intel can have more cash reserves than anyone, but without a plan going forward they're just going to be some ATARI waiting to be replaced by NINTENDO. Note: I am not an Intel employee, therfore Intel may well have a plan going forward, they may well have R&D going on as part of a plan to remain the market leader. All I know is they've dropped the ball on both their itanic and pentium 5 roadmaps that they had released years ago... And I know they've lost a lot of talented people in R&D and managment... AMD is gaining new talent in R&D and managment, or at least they did when they aquired parts of the DEC Alpha team.
Intel needs to recover not from one failed processor, but rather from internal problems that have lead to the current state of stagnation within the company.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
No, they are not making up the numbers. However, it takes some time to set up a top-ranking supercomputer (most of the time is not building the thing - you can just use college students paid in pizza - but debugging the inevitable problems in the network that arise as soon as you try putting any significant load on the system; I've worked next to a guy who spent months debugging a puny 12-box beowulf cluster, and problems are exponentially worse for the large supercomputers). The setup times are even worse for government and military machines - I suppose they need to meet strignent quality specs. As a result, many of the processors on top-500 are not state of the art (e.g. 1.25 GHz Alphas) so it might not the best place to look if you want to find out what CPU to use for a future supercomputer. If you notice, some of the highest scores are attained by IBM's BlueGene - which uses massive numbers of slow embedded PowerPC's, but comes out on top because of its excellent, fault-tolerant networking.
If I had infinite $ and a very big room, I would order 64 SGI Altix systems with 512 Itanium2's each, running SGI's custom Linux distro, and link those babies up in a big cluster. 32768 Itanium2's > 32768 PowerPC 440's.
No, but it has taken until XP SP2 to really sound the 16-Bit Windows death knell, try installing the LucasArts Tie Fighter/X-Wing series games on an XP SP2 box, it finally fails, even SP1 could be coaxed into making them work.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
The thing is microsoft only ever had a half-assed version for itanic, lacking many of the features of the x86 version and having virtually no apps available to run it, either from microsoft or third parties...
Therefore, noone bought it.. because noone had ported software to it..
Noone ported software to it because noone bought it..
The only people who made use of them, are running opensource software on them, which is easy to port yourself if it hasn't been done already.. And plenty of people have motive to port it (the hardware vendors for one, HP contributed a lot to the port of linux to the itanic) whereas commercial software vendors have no incentive to port to a new architecture.
See. the closed source commercial business model is stifling hardware innovation. And in years to come, people will still be stuck with chips that have huge chunks of their die space wasted on backwards compatibility circuitry, and software that doesn't take advantage of new features.
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.. 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.