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Microsoft Announces End of the Line For Itanium Support
WrongSizeGlass writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has announced on its Windows Server blog the end of its support for Itanium. 'Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2010 will represent the last versions to support Intel's Itanium architecture.' Does this mean the end of Itanium? Will it be missed, or was it destined to be another DEC Alpha waiting for its last sunset?"
It would appear that the good ship Itanic has struck an MS Iceberg 2010 Datacenter Edition R2!
Seriously, though: is this an admission by Microsoft that HP-UX is(somehow) hanging on at the high end, despite HP's every attempt to mismanage it, or (more likely) is this a consequence of the fact that, at this point, there is nothing Itanium can do that Intel couldn't do better and cheaper just by bolting some extra cache and a few extra Itanium features onto Xeons?
I am incredibly offended that you would compare this bloated, brute-force, abomination of a chip to the incredibly well designed, elegant, and efficient Alpha (may it rest in peace).
No one can stop the x86 train, not even Intel.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Competent CPU designers, yes. It's the only reason Itanium has lasted this long. Intel's solo early designs were less than successful. HP designer came in redid the whole thing and lo-and-behold it worked. HP really needs Intel to fab the chip, not design it.
It's fundamentally irrelevant whether anyone thinks that x86 is "passable" - it's a proven fact. We have 15 years of out-of-order x86 implementations that prove that.
Yeah, you have to handle the brain-dead instruction encodings in the decoder, and you need to emit micro-ops for a bunch of obscure instructions that no one ever uses (to maintain compatibility). You also have to handle the multiple obscure and obsolete memory addressing modes.
But the reality is that no one but engineers gives a crap about this. In a world of 300M+ transistor cores, there just isn't that much overhead to making the CPU compatible. Most of the die space is cache anyway nowadays.
We can't compare what x86 is to what POWER or MIPS or SPARC "would have been" in some speculative world where Intel wasn't the dominant desktop/server CPU manufacturer. There's no magic bullet that can make load-store architectures amazingly fast but that doesn't apply to x86. Almost all of the technology out there can apply equally to a modern x86 CPU.
What sells CPUs is not having a clean and simple ISA. What sells CPUs is performance, power consumption, and, in many cases, compatibility. If having a clean ISA accomplishes those objectives, so much the better. But Intel and AMD have shown that you can make a fast, low-power, compatible x86 CPU and sell it at a very low price. That's what matters.