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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."
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
on Longhorn.
Where the hell is Netcraft when you need it?
You can't handle the truth.
Does this mean I can get out of my MS EULA now?
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/
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.
The Itanium was the only realistic chance we had to get away from the x86 for the forseeable future, and the designers blew it. So sad. Excuse me while I start one of my Leonard Cohen albums, I need something to cheer me up.
Um, what happened to the Windows "Vista" moniker?
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
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.
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!
[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?
It is widely acknowledged that Windows ME was a step back in quality and usability. While Longhorn/Vista may not be as great of a leap forward as it was originally portrayed to be, there is little to suggest it will suffer from the massive flaws that Windows ME did.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
And what about Itanium in Apple servers? Does anybody think it's possible?
Itanium Will Only Be Partly Supported by Longhorn
getSexySig();
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
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!
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.
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
They should use that as their slogan. Windows Vista: Not Worse Than XP!
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