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IBM to Drop Itanium
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."
First they drop a PC line tha was not making them money. Then they drop a server line that's clearly not the future of that space. I think they're making some right decisions here. If the POWER platform succeeds, as it more likely would when resources are focussed on it, and it is accepted as a viable alternative to the PC platform, the ensuing competition would probably be good for all of us.
IBM doesn't market IBM products. They market IBM. You buy into IBM, you do everything their way, and everything will work. These days, they add "...and you will get the best possible performance" to that, too. Nothing out there has the performance of the latest-generation POWER processors. As IBM has been busy proving building supercomputer after supercomputer, it scales pretty well too :) Granted, highly parallel opteron processors are pretty slick, but given a level playing field I know what I'd pick. Intel introduced itanium too late and at too high a cost to make enough inroads before opteron started to take off, and now itanic has no chance to proliferate enough to ever become inexpensive. IBM has been putting work specifically into making their cores as modular as possible so they can easily turn them into other versions ever since the PowerPC 601, which is why we new PowerPC cores so closely follow the release of new POWER cores.
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IBM already uses it in their high-end server products, like the ones that used to be called RS/6000.
Actually, that hardly does it justice. pSeries (formerly RS/6000), yes, but also iSeries (formerly AS/400) is now POWER. The new OpenPower line of systems from IBM can run AIX, i5/OS (formerly OS/400), and Linux. In fact, it can run them simultaneously thanks to IBM's really good server partitioning technology (you can partition down to 1/10 of a CPU!).
I'm currently doing some development work on one of these boxes (running Linux on POWER) and let me tell you, it just smokes. Runs circles around Itanium, even before you start parallelizing (which is usually the case, since you're always going to have a dual-core chip, maybe even several of them).
IBM has absolutely no reason to continue supporting Itanium. It doesn't buy them anything. Itanic is an architecture nobody wants. If Intel hadn't sank so much R&D into it while still being able to live off the revenue from their 32-bit processors (and now, their AMD64 clones), Itanium would have been shelved a year ago.
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AMD64 is the real deal. EM64T is a kludge that is mostly compatible with AMD64. AMD64 has better performance and better handling of >4GB RAM.