A Brief History of Chip Hype and Flops

On CNet.com, Brooke Crowthers has a review of some flops in the chip-making world — from IBM, Intel, and AMD — and the hype that surrounded them, which is arguably as interesting as the chips' failures. "First, I have to revisit Intel's Itanium. Simply because it's still around and still missing production target dates. The hype: 'This design philosophy will one day replace RISC and CISC. It is a gateway into the 64-bit future.' ... The reality: Yes, Itanium is still warm, still breathing in the rarefied very-high-end server market — where it does have a limited role. But... it certainly hasn't remade the computer industry."

Comments

Re:Itanium would have worked-AMD screwed it for in

[snowgirl]

I don't think so. x86-64 is fully backwards-compatible with x86. Itanium is not.

Wanna guess why they're not that popular?

You don't know the architecture? The first Itaniums had hardware x86 processors. The only reason they don't now, is that it was found to be faster to emulate the x86 than run it with a diminished hardware.

Re:unpublished disaster

[Rockoon]

You are uninformed. The AMD multi-core "problem" is a software problem.

People who programmed for single-core systems assumed that the processors internal tick count, called the timestamp counter (read with the RDTSC instruction), would be monotonically increasing. The fact is that each core could have its own timestamp counter and if a process is migrated to another core by the OS scheduler, then the monotonically increasing assumption falls flat (time can appear to run backwards.) This is true for AMD multi-core processors as well as ALL (AMD and Intel) multi-processor setups.

The AMD patch does several things, one of which is to instruct windows to not use the timestamp counter for use in its own time-keeping. Windows XP defaulted to using this timestamp counter for timing, because both dual-core and multi-cpu systems essentially didnt even exist when it was released. This is accomplished by a simple alteration to boot.ini telling windows to use PMTIMER instead of its default.

Any modern games that are not fixed by the above patch were programmed by stupid people. Thats right... Stupid. They are accessing hardware directly rather than going through a standardized time keeping layer. Their assumptions about time are wrong when using RDTSC, because it isnt a time-keeper. Its a tick counter specifically associated with a CPU (Intel/AMD) or CORE (AMD)