Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IBM to Drop Itanium

Posted by Zonk on from the xeon-chips-have-the-power dept.

Hack Jandy writes "Xbitlabs is reporting that IBM chose not to persue Itanium in their next generation server lineup because of the "market acceptance issues" of the platform. They will still continue with new revisions of Xeon servers, however. With IBM's investments in Power, I can't help but think the writing was already on the wall. The article also hints that IBM might start using Power in their high end server products."

4 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Stick a fork in it, it's done by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful
    No one outside of certain specialized environments that demand loads of floating point is interested in itanic. Flush the damn thing already and work on EM64T, will you intel?

    WTF does "The article also hints that IBM might start using Power in their high end server products" mean anyway? The processor is called POWER, and IBM already uses it in their high-end server products, like the ones that used to be called RS/6000. As for Power, well, show me a transistor that works without it.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. I'll miss it by m50d · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Say what you like, but Itanium was a nice architecture. The compiler is the proper place for the optimisations, the processor should be left to do the actual processing. It's still the most efficient way I know to do raytracing or anything multimediay, and I predict there will still be a market for them for some time.

    On second thought, maybe they'll start appearing cheaply on ebay. That'd be nice.

    --
    I am trolling
    1. Re:I'll miss it by Schweg · · Score: 5, Insightful

      With Itanium, Intel attempted to tackle a set of issues that isn't new, and other companies have tried (and failed at) before. It's hard to shift almost all of the burden of optimization, because it's a case of "early optimization" (the root of all evil). Optimization by the processor at run-time allows one to deal with data-dependent issues, and base decisions on statistics gathered by modern processors (such as branch history, caching behavior, etc). Intel made a good try at it, but ended up making a very power-hungry processor that exposed a lot of complexity to the programmer, and whose advantages compared to other processors on the market were not very clear.

  3. Re:Getting leaner, IBM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, the reason that Power(PC) never made a dent in x86 is that IBM promised everyone that it would scale better and it simply did not. Furthermore, IBM themselves quashed cheap PowerPC workstations due to internal politics surrounding OS/2, never provided good chipsets to third parties, etc.

    Hey "Blame Microsoft For Everything" is fun, but IBM never seriously attempted to position PowerPC in the mainstream x86 market.