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Intel Dumps Iitanium's x86 Hardware Compatibility

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the back-to-the-drawing-board dept.

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.'"

2 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. why not Alpha by xx_chris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    if they are going to dump x86 compatibility, why not dump Itanium compatibility and just go back to Alpha?

  2. Re:why not Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Politics. Yes, Alpha is a much superior platform, technically speaking, than pretty much anything else out there today. But for Intel to turn their back on Itanic (thank you, Register, for consistently misnaming the Itanium in such an apt way) would mean admitting that the billions of R&D they spent on it was a waste. HP also has political reasons to not resurrect Alpha.

    Damn shame, that. If they'd poured as much money into Alpha as they did into Itanic, they'd have a platform that would whomp all over everything currently in the marketplace.