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Itanium Will Only Be Partly Supported by Longhorn

Posted by Hemos on from the the-diminishing-roles dept.

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."

1 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is this really a big deal? by jiushao · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Are there reasons other than poor support from Micorsoft for Itanics massive failure? Is it a poor arcitecture?

    In the world of good compilers originally envisioned by HP/Intel: No.
    In practice: Yes.

    Why? Because compilers aren't nearly as good as HP/Intel hoped but state of the art Out-of-Order processors are great. There is only so much theorethically possible ILP to extract in regular code, and good OoO chips extract most of it in an automatic fashion from existing code. So the hardware guys did a better job here than the software guys, and the Itanium bet on software.

    To clarify on OoO processors doing most of the possible work in extracting ILP: Even if the instruction window was increased to infinity (that is, all ILP is always found) it would still not yield dramatically much better performance (I have seen estimates of about 25% best-case). So even with a perfect compiler there is just not much to gain, and we do not have perfect compilers. This very high level of performance in extracting ILP is what is forcing the new shift to TLP with architectures like the Sun Niagara.

    I don't think we should be pleased that the Itanium failed. As I have often discussed in the past I think Intel really deserves a lot of credit, they are the undisputed top dog in the market, and despite that they are also one of the companies that consistently attempt new different approaches in high-profile products. Neither the Itanium nor the Netburst (which really is interesting and innovative technology) worked out well, but it is trying things that makes technology move forward.

    That's not to say that AMD is a bad company, they managed to make the best x86 implementation yet, which is great (though I still consider the K7 to have been the golden age since their pricing structure truly was incredible then).