Intel Dumps Iitanium's x86 Hardware Compatibility

Spinlock_1977 writes "C|Net is running a story that Intel is going back to software x86 emulation on Itanium in order to reclaim chip real estate. (room for another 9MB of cache?) One notable quote about x86 emulation: 'Basically, no one ever used hardware-based IA-32 execution, so better to use the silicon for something else,' said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. 'Of course, basically no one uses software-based emulation either, but at least that doesn't cost chip real estate.'"

Comments

Better use for sillicon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel's chips will use that extra sillicon for a nice pair of fake breasts. That's sure to up their earnings next quarter. Take that AMD.

Intel is continuing development?

[DurendalMac]

Sheesh, the Itanic wasn't exactly a success story. How does it fit into their new roadmap with cooler chips that eat less power? That processor was a goddamn space heater.

What he meant to say was..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Of course, basically no one uses Itanium either..."

Extend the logic

[bstadil]

'Basically, no one ever used hardware-based IA-32 execution, so better to use the silicon for something else,' said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. 'Of course, basically no one uses software-based emulation either, but at least that doesn't cost chip real estate.'"

Why not extend that logic? No one really used the Itanium chip anyway so why not use the silicon to make Yohan's for Apple?

Re:Shouldn't matter with modern software.

[Eightyford]

Virtual machine based stuff (Java/JVM, .NET/CLR) (even popular on cell phones these days)

So that's why it takes two friggen minutes to turn on my cell phone!

Re:Shouldn't matter with modern software.

[Eightyford]

Flamebait huh? There must have been a Java programmer with mod points.

Irony .... somewhere

[WasterDave]

There's a sense of irony with Apple having, apparently, no problem getting PPC emulation to work on an Intel x86 ... and Intel having no joy running x86 emulation on IA64. If I didn't know better it would look to me like IA64 is a bag of crap.

Oh, hang on.

Dave

Re:Shouldn't matter with modern software.

[bobcat7677]

Now I understand! That little coffee cup symbol that comes up on my phone is really telling me to go have a cup of coffee while I wait for the Java software to start. And all along I thought it was not functional at all but just an amusing little pun on the "Java" name... Silly me.

as soon as...

[Sebastopol]

...Intel figures out what to do with the probably thousands of people working Itanic, they'll drop it. You can't just nix such a huge project and bone all the employees. I suspect they've been wanting to drag this thing out back and shoot it for some time, I mean it gets ZERO real estate or marketing attention on the website or corporate SEC prospectus info. Never read about it adding to bottom line in any filings.

Maybe they just make it for the supercomputer folks... a niche market which is probably 10x larger and 100x more profitable than the propeller-beanie AMD fanboy crowd that trolls around here, scoffing at neon-illumiation-free chassis.

Re:Shouldn't matter with modern software.

[chris_eineke]

You mean 'a Java programmer with a collection of instances of class ModPoint'. ;)

Re:x86: Intel's biggest mistake

[Zencyde]

Memory allocation while coding. :P