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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."
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.
To put it nicely, Slashdot rarely breaks news. To put it specifically, this is common. Slashdot depends on user submission for them to have any idea what's going on.
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.
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.
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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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.
..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.
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
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.
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
This just seems to be another iceberg to hit the Itanic.
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.
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?
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.
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.'"
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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