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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."
Between this and their roadmap that almost exclusively involves power consumption improvements, Intel is starting to lose it's edge over AMD.
From talking to Intel folks quite a bit, it seems like there is a lot of blind pride on Intel's part in their product line and vision, and they dismiss most anything that I raise as an issue with their performance vs. AMD, and that's not a good sign to me.
Intel is not dying that's for sure, but they're going to have to make a course correction and not make another decade long mistake like itanium.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
Does this remind anyone else of WindowsME? Vista has seemed to shed features in droves; WinME was a ultimately a non-version with some cosmetic changes and function that didn't live up to the hype. Is this what we can expect for Redmonds latest and greatest?
The interesting thing isnt really whether Vista/Longhorn will support Itanium, but whether Windows Server will.
Of course, a few years ago Intel hoped to put Itanium in workstations, but they can hardly have hoped much for that lately. No, Itanium is for servers, and there is Windows Server.
However, internally Windows Server is the same shit as Windows Vista, so if they dont support it in one, they probably dont find it very strategic to support it in the other. And as we all know, Itanium is much more dying than BSD will ever be, but that is another story.
It is rare when someone comes up with an entirely new architecture and instruction set. The IA64 was a complete break and had it been pushed correctly, AMD would be rushing to make IA64 clones instead of Intel supporting AMDs 64-bit extension.
If I remember correctly, the IA64 has 128 general purpose registers and 128 floating point registers. It's a load/store machine and it's pretty close to a RISC arch (really it's an "very long word" instruction set, but lets not get picky).
It was a chance to make a clean break from the old 32-bit legacy chips, however the price was and is too high and AMDs are cheaper and still very powerful.
I really hope this chip doesn't die off. At least with limited support in the new Windows, it will still have a strong server market, but I think a lot of companies are going to be afraid to buy because of running into compatibility problems. I know at where I work, we'd like to have servers that can do anything/general purpose. You put a limit on what the OS can do and then you're afraid of old legacy or propriety software not working correctly
But hey as long as you use Linux, the IA64 is fairly well supported, and it will be better supported in Linux than in Windows!
Sumdog
I think you fail to realise an important thing: change typically happens by evolution, not revolution, and that's even more true when there's a multi-billion dollar industry involved. Do you honestly believe that everyone's just going to throw every system they have away?
It's not gonna happen. The industry likes migration/upgrade paths, and in 90% of all cases, a design that extends is gonna win over one that outright replaces.
Intel seems to have been unwilling to face that fact, but what they failed to realise is that their monopoly is not big enough to simply force change on people - rather, their move just gave AMD etc. an opportunity to slowly but steadily chip away at that monopoly.
From a market perspective, that's a good thing, of course - but if I was an Intel shareholder, I'd demand that heads roll for this gross mismanagement in the top executive floor.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Is that really a positive side? Everyone I know in the compiler world (well GCC world) complains very much about the ia64 architecture. So why do people think this is a positive side, when really it is a negative side of the world.
Everything I've read on Slashdot and Wired talks to what will not be in Longhorn. What will be in Longhorn that will make it better than XP? More and different vulnerabilities? (Maybe it will ship with a demo .wmv file showing Microsoft executive throwing chairs around offices in response to other MS executives leaving for Google!)
Seriously ... though I'm an Apple user from before Macs were released I've also used every version of Windows - always at work but I've also had every version except XP at home.
With each new Mac OS X release I look forward to what will be in that version - but there's little talk around the water cooler regarding what will actually be in Longhorn/ Vista. Unlike Mac OS releases, which people anticipate because of stuff like Dashboard, iTunes integration, .Mac integration, Spotlight and Automator, all I hear is what Longhorn/ Vista won't have ...
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
There is nothing wrong with the Itanium. The chip is used in some of the world's fastest supercomputers.
But, the Itanium is quite different from earlier x86 chips, because it doesn't make guesses to try to run a series of binary statements in parallel.
Instead, the Itanium provides the facility for running statements in parallel, but it leaves it up to the software to decide when and how to do it. That's a good thing, because a compiler, using the original source code, can do a much better job of parallelizing operations, than the CPU can do with the binary. This is even more true for languages that are designed for parallelism.
However, this improvement does not come for free, rather, in order for software to make full use of the Itanium's speed, the compilers must be updated to produce binary code that will run in parallel.
Linux can already run quite well on the Itanium, and with further improvements to GCC, Linux and its applications will do even better.
So what's wrong with Windows on the Itanium?
Well, to put it bluntly, Microsoft is a technically deficient company, and they have failed to make the necessary compiler changes for the Itanium. And with this announcement, they are telling us that they also don't expect to do it in the near future.
But then, we already knew that Microsoft is technically deficient. Just look at how:
- DOS stagnated until DR-DOS introduced some new ideas.
- IE stagnated until Opera and Mozilla introduced some new ideas.
- Microsoft's first usable GUI (W95) came ten years after the Macintosh, and five years after Geoworks.
- Microsoft cancelled all its earlier 64-bit support.
- Microsoft can't seem to fix its security problems.
- Microsoft needs to hire outside talent to open up new directions (NT 3.51, C#).
- Microsoft had to sabotage WordPerfect rather than compete with it.
- Microsoft had to "cut off Netscape's air supply" rather than compete with it.
- Microsoft had to "grow the polluted Java market" rather than compete with it.
- New Windows versions miss dates and deliverables by years.
- And so on.
Now consider what is going to happen to Microsoft as the market moves to the newer multi-core CPU architectures from IBM, Sony, and Intel. Do you really think that Microsoft is going to be able to keep up with technically-able competitors like Linux?
I suspect that Microsoft still has some opportunities to adopt the work of others, for example, building the next Windows on BSD (if they haven't done it already with Longhorn/Vista).
But sooner or later, Microsoft is going to run out of ways to beat their opponents though copying, sabitage, legal manouvers, and FUD.
At that point, Microsoft will have to compete based on the merits of their software. And their history makes is doubtful that they can succeed.
I really doubt that... Do you hear many speak of Windows Chicago, Windows Memphis, or Windows Whistler today? Longhorn will quickly fade as the Microsoft marketing machine comes into play, just like we got Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows XP respectively above.
You speak of fragmentation too... Do you hear a lot of confusion between what Windows 2000 and NT 5.0 is? Do you hear many call Windows XP as NT 5.1? Windows 2003 Server as NT 5.2?
It's the marketing machine that decides, unless maybe for a percentage or two consisting of geeks that have been really deep into Windows alphas and betas.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'm not confusing architecture with instruction set. If you're talking about the x86 architecture, then you're talking about all x86, not just one specific implementation.
I'll agree that the later designs have been very nice. The Pentium-M and Pentium-D, along with the AMD designs are all incredible.
You say that the x86 design allows you to to take advantage of system busses in ways that many RISC instruction sets don't, but there's nothing that would stop them from doing so, except there's been little incentive to do so.
Yeah, you can make x86 perform well per watt. I'm not arguing that you can't. This is the very reason that Apple is switching to the x86, because Intel's roadmap is focusing on the Performance per Watt.
Like or not, x86 is *NOT* the best. It's just the *FASTEST*. Which does not make it the best. Because "best" encompasses a number of fields where not the majority of it is "fastest" for me.
I have philosophical objections to CISC designs, same as many people have philisophical objections to monolithic kernels. Does this mean that CISC and monolithic are bad? Does it mean that they are slower? No, quite the opposite, they are faster, and they're not "bad". They're just not as good as what could be done.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Majority of Itanium cpu's sold already run Linux. Rest run HPUX. Intel,HP and SGI work do hard to make Linux run well on Itanium. With Linux having most compilable software readily available, it is probably the best thing to run on a niche arch anyway.
So what this article may actually mean, is that there is no market for _windows_ in Itanium space anymore. Which isn't that suprising, when there is hardly any windows/ia64 applications, what use an empty OS is?
IMO what Itanium needs to become a success, is a price cut, rather than more Windows support.
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