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Itanium Will Only Be Partly Supported by Longhorn
ver.sicher.ungsvergleich writes "Although stopping short of pulling the plug entirely on Itanium, MS has said that Longhorn will only be able to work for a limited number of higher-end jobs. On the positive side, Microsoft does see a future for the chip, but that 'big iron' slot is not exactly what Chipzilla envisioned as Itanium's future."
That's the problem with using codenames for products, especially in these circumstances. The codenames often become far more widely known and used than the product name.
When it comes to this software, many techies will continue to refer to Windows Vista as "Longhorn", which will no doubt confuse many regular users.
Now instead of having one coherent name known throughout the marketplace (ie. Windows Vista), the name has been fragmented (ie. Longhorn, Windows NT 6.0, etc.).
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Haha... I didnt read the fucking article first ;)
I better flame myself before someone else does. This was about "Windows Longhorn Server". Sorry Intel - this must suck big time!
Actually, the Itanium design is 32 accessible registers at any given time with a "sliding window" design for accessing some 16~24 of them (I don't remember the raw number off hand).
:(
What this allows one to do is just slide the window further down the line before making a function call, or sliding the window around while doing a loop, so you can perform some loop operations without changing the instruction's declared register usage, but rather just by sliding the window.
As the register window rotates around, and starts colliding with already used hardware registers, the hardware automagically handles storing the values into a stack, and then retrieving them back when the window slide returns.
Thus, you get an architecture that can have literally any number of registers, which is what happened with the Itanium 2. They doubled the number of registers, and put in 256!
I really like this design, and I hate reading all the time that it's dying out. I'd say that maybe if it goes the way of the Alpha, that it would make it easier for me to get my hands on one, but I seriously doubt that would happen.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Actually not. Remember, Windows NT 3.5x and 4.0 versions did support the full functionality of the Pentium Pro in true WIN32 API mode, so the Pentium Pro wasn't really a complete failure (it was the choice for server machines for quite a while).
Besides, the Pentium Pro CPU core design became the basis for the Pentium II, Pentium III and Celeron CPU's.
Vista is a finnish word for 'pussy'.
Ja vitut ole!
(Translation for the language challenged: No it fucking isn't!)
Vista doesn't mean anything in finnish, although it very well could be a finnish word.
ps. The word you are thinking is vittu...
Microsoft recently bought Connectix, makers of VirtualPC, ostensibly to use their system virtualisation technology in new Microsoft products.
You call February 19, 2003 recent? C'mon man, at least do some research. That's over two human years and 14 dog years. That's 23.46 technology years! This Google search turns up links regarding Microsoft's purchase. This is the second link in the search!
Jesus christ, I knew slashdot was behind by a couple weeks when they reported things but you could usually rely on the readers. Two years is inexcusable. Turn in your Google access pass at the door on the way out please. Any Google API information you have downloaded should be deleted immediately. search.msn.com is now your only search engine.
I think he was intending on saying "OSX Intel". A lot of people are calling it "OS x86" and just assuming that people get that they're talking about Mac OS.
Though, Apple have themselves used "Mac OSX Intel" to refer to OSX running on Intel hardware. Thus, I stick with that moniker.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
The parent is not quite correct.
The Itanium instruction sets allows code to access between 32 and 128 general registers (aka integer registers), at the discretion of the piece of code, and 128 floating point registers. The sliding window design is for the integer registers 32-127 and can indeed be considered as a sliding window on a memory stack. It is up to each piece of code to decide how many registers it wants to use (in increments of 8 ?).
On top of that there is the ability to design a subset of the high registers (registers with an index higher than 32) as rotating. This makes modulo-pipelining worthwile by removing the requirement for register-to-register moves to push things down the (conceptual) pipeline at each iteration of the loop.
WinNT is a derivative of VMS if you look at the kernel internals:
* Packet-driven I/O subsystem
* Delayed Procedure Calls
* Asynchronous Procedure Calls
* The security model at the lowest level
* The object manager (although it was somewhat non-formal in VMS)
I mean, if you've ever programmed both systems at the kernel level you would be pretty shocked how similar they are. I mean, WNT feels like a more modern VMS with some things new and some things removed (sadly, like the amazing VMS cluster support).
The kernel of NT really is very VMS-like. Its not a bad kernel at all, either. Just because the crap M$ piles on top of it is utter shit doesn't mean that the underlaying kernel isn't of very high quality.
This document (PDF) is from 1999 and explains why the Alpha engineers thought Alpha would win over Itanium.
i a64.pdf
http://www.raytheon-computers.com/ref_docs/alpha_
The rest we know; the Alpha was ditched when HP bought Compaq (who bought DEC earlier), because HP wanted to eliminate any threats to its Itanium bet.
)9TSS
Really? Because I lived through that era, and I and a bunch of other folks that did think otherwise. I was a VMS user long before NT ever came out. Coming from a VMS background, it's not hard to see more similarities in the foundation of the OS than I see with it and OS/2.
I can point you to quite a few other sites with evidence that NT is more based on VMS with just some compatible bits from OS/2 included.
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?Art icleID=4494
Looks the the terminology, the table of significant similarities, etc. They included an OS/2 compatability layer and some bits and pieces they had been working on from OS/2, but the basics of the system were VMS-like.
It wasn't just Dave Culter MS hired away from VMS, it was also about 20 former Digital employees that had worked with him on the Mica project, a whole new updated version of VMS. Whether or not they included exact code they wrote for Mica in NT (and Microsoft's settlement with DEC implies there was), you know they had to implement some of the ideas they had been working on. Software developers rarely like to give up on good new ideas they invent and DEC killed Mica. Incorporating those ideas in NT was the only way they would see the light of day.
For a graphical representation:
That's hardly a scholarly study of OS history. Have you looked at their links for references? It's nothing special. For Microsoft, they have exactly two link as references, and one of them is the exact article I posted above for you which states that NT *is* a direct descendent of VMS.
And lastly, if NT is a direct descendent of VMS, who is the idiot that removed the stability bits?
In case you hadn't noticed, NT has to run on a LOT more different types of hardware than VMS ever had to. Most of the instability in NT came from driver issues. It's not really surprising that it's more unstable than VMS. As a server/desktop rather than a server only OS, Microsoft also made some choices to help out it's desktop performance (moving video to ring0 in NT4, etc) that didn't help stability at all.