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Dell Dumping Itanium

Posted by Zonk on from the nice-to-have-known-you dept.

njcoder writes "In a PC World article it is disclosed and confirmed by Intel that Dell is dropping support for Itanium processors. 'After Advanced Micro Devices demonstrated that 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set offered a smoother transition to 64-bit computing, Intel released a version of Xeon with similar technology, and Dell now offers 64-bit Xeon processors across its product line.'" More from the article: "The chip maker has since backed off its original statements about Itanium and is now promoting the chip as a high-performance replacement for reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors in Unix servers from companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. Hewlett-Packard, a co-designer of the processor, has embraced Itanium as the processor of choice for its high-end servers. Fujitsu. and NEC are also among the system vendors that sell servers with the processor." The story is also being reported at Ars Technica.

4 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD? by popo · · Score: 4, Interesting


    One has to wonder, outside the obvious explanation of Intel's anti-competitive trade practices, what is Dell's aversion to AMD 64-bit / dual-core processors?

    Clearly there is significant (and growing) demand for Opterons.

    Dell's outright refusal to offer AMD chips seems almost like proof of itself that Intel is acting in an anti-competitive manner.

    Has Dell ever put forth a better explanation?

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  2. Ummmm .... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Isn't everyone dumping Itanium? Why is Dell any different?

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  3. Writing has been on the wall by akuma(x86) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Itanium is all but dead... relegated to the supercomputer niche - and we all know what happens to supercomputer companies :)

    Intel has spent billions on Itanium and seen an effective return of 0%. Investors won't tolerate this for much longer. AMD's x86-64, and Intel's subsequent introduction of EMT64 (same thing), have finally pushed this ill conceived idea into its well deserved death spiral.

    It has no technical merit. But technical merit sometimes is a secondary matter in the business world. However, the economics don't make any sense - you can't introduce a new ISA into a mature software market and expect it to fly just because you're Intel.

    It was a mistake - write it off and move on.

    This should free Intel to deploy those valuable Itanium engineers (like the ex-Alpha team) to work on something that actually generates cash (like x86 servers). So while AMD might have a short term lead - the giant resources of Intel are more than enough to catch up and re-assert their leadership position.

    1. Re:Writing has been on the wall by akuma(x86) · · Score: 5, Interesting

      x86 processors have a fixed amount of decoder logic overhead vs. RISC. The decoders essentially dynamically translate the x86 instructions into more machine-friendly micro-ops which are very RISC-like.

      As transistor budgets increase exponentially (thanks to Moore's law), that fixed overhead gets smaller and smaller each generation - to the point that it's insigificant (less than 5% today and getting smaller tomorrow). So in the early 90s you could make a case for more efficient computing with RISC vs. x86, but today it's just so negligable that you don't care. There are also numerous micro-architectural tricks to get around the limited registers and wacky addressing modes.

      Couple this with the fact that 99% of all of the world's software is written for x86 and you have a very large inertia to overcome in order to change the ISA.

      Why would any software vendor port their application to a new architecture if that architecture is brand new and nobody is using it initially? This is a very expensive and risky task. Let's say that the incentive is increased performance with a new ISA (highly unlikely given that the ISA doesn't matter anymore given the very large transitors budgets). But let's be generous and give it a 50% performance advantage (again - this is fantasy land). Do you spend the 8 months porting, debugging, testing Photoshop? Or do you just wait 8 months for a 50% faster x86 to come out and instead spend that time improving your product as opposed to keeping it the same on a different architecture?

      You'd have to be crazy to take that tradeoff. And so, you see what we have today - x86 everywhere.