Slashdot Mirror
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."
Microsoft recently bought Connectix, makers of VirtualPC, ostensibly to use their system virtualisation technology in new Microsoft products.
Will virtual X86 servers running on Itanium be an available option to supply services not supported by native Itanium code?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Intel is in transition as far as processor direction, so there's no suprise here. Itanium has been dead for a while. The Microsoft "support" is there only because it's already been written and there probably is some support agreements already in place.
The real news would be what the sucessor to x86 will be.
Sure, Intel may have originally hoped to migrate the world to IA64, but given the wild success of AMD64 in bringing 64-bit to the x86 world, it doesn't look like that's happening. The Itanium chips Intel is releasing are obviously not aimed at tasks that could be handled by a 386 with some SCSI drives ("fax server"? a file server?)... who is going to use a multi-thousand-dollar CPU for anything other than database|web|high-end server anyway?
My server
is that chip companies do not work harder to make OSS their premier OS on their chips. MS will only support a small group of chips as it is expensive and hard to support a load of these. As such, if MS does not see an advantage to themselves, they are not going to bother with it (as it should be). But if a chips company makes OSS-based OS their premier OS, they then control their future. Intel and HP have spent billions trying to get Itanium to be the major server chip. But it will die partialy due to MSs choice.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Um, what happened to the Windows "Vista" moniker?
Its deja vu all over again.
MS was slow to get 32 bit support to the Pentium Pro, and Intel twisted in the wind for a couple years with expensive chips and no support for the mainstream.
Now we have Itanium64 and MS is again (very) late with support, and now saying that the much promised and never yet delivered Longhorn will not give the support to Itanium that it will need.
Maybe Intel ought not to accept MS's promise of support for new chip architectures and look to FOSS for their hot new chip's support for the first couple years. What a boost to their sales and to the FOSS world if they'd supply the kernel updates for their new architecture.
Seems like they ought to know:
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me."
Sig: Nothing to see here, move along.
[drumroll please]
I mean, talk about a soap opera:
Who knows what the moral of this story is?Maybe: Hardware comes and hardware goes, but software is forever?
PowerPC/POWER is still viable, and IBM may have another go at putting them in consumer machines if an OS that runs on PPC becomes popular in the desktop space.
ARM-derived chips are still going strong. At IDF there was an XScale chip demo'd that ran at 1.25GHz - probably fast enough for 90% of users.
Alpha remains my all time favourite architecture - pure 64-bit, and the PAL code concept is remarkably elegant.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Itanium is a joke.
...yada yada. Chip fabrication has improved tremendously and something just have to be done in hardware. Engineering wise the Itanium was doomed to the start. If you are going to use LVIW use it right like Transmeta or the newer Intel chips that are comming out.
Its all the things these newer PentiumV's and PentiumMII's that are coming out, supposed to be. They are VLIW and use very little power, slim, and efficient.
Itanium was supposed to really take off back in 1997 according to all the analysists. How many years is that? Good lord!
HP shot itself in the foot because they had no concept of sunkin investments or sunk costs and demanded everyone use their hogs with full 1 pound heat sinks and a fan that sounds like a jet engine taking off.
To me the heat sinks alone and the fans show me something is seriously wrong and they are trying to overclock the chips to rediciously speeds just to look normal compared to the pentium's and alpha chips.
Why couldn't the alpha live?
I think moving optimizations in software is a bad idea. Please dont give me this stuff from the Intel marketing department that as time goes on there will be no room for anything on the cpu but cache so move everything to the compiler
http://saveie6.com/
Actually AMD probably wouldn't be rushing to make IA64 clones. They wouldn't be allowed to. Decades ago, Intel was forced to license the x86 technology to another manufacturer to prevent a 100% monopoly in the general purpose consumer chip market. Obviously, Intel doesn't like this at all, since it basically means they can't beat AMD as long as the world is still on x86. (They can still hold the lion's share of the market and make a metric shit ton of money, but they can't win, because AMD has to be there.)
One of the lesser known reasons for Intel's plan to develop and push the Itanium was that it would be a clean break with x86, which means that AMD would not be allowed to make them. Intel would be the only supplier allowed to make the chip. Then they'd get sued for it, and would settle by giving rights to manufacture them to some small company with one fab that's a generation or two behind. AMD would have been stuck with x86, and Intel would have won. (Bear in mind that if the switch had been successful, Itanium would have been adopted long before x86-64 and the Opteron were developed.)
Frankly, I'm glad the Itanium failed. Even though it's a pretty cool chip with an interesting design, I'd rather have Opterons available than not.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
If that's not a course correction, what do you think is?
You may dismiss power consumption improvements, but if you think about it carefully, improving power consumption IS improving performance.
If you can halve the power consumption of a chip, it means you have the energy budget to now 'double' the power consumption of a chip, and possible double the performance.
Their netburst architecture hit a power wall; its pretty difficult to operate 120W CPUs. If they can get the same performance at 12W, and then increase the available power to 120, they can now get upwards of 10x the performance, barring process inefficiencies.
Power consumption is a big deal. Think of it this way: A car that doubles it's fuel efficiency from 12mpg to 24mpg can now go twice as far on the same tank of gas. So with CPUs; double the power efficiency, and double the available amount of compute resources.
GPL Deconstructed