If there was no longer a need for something, it would become obsolete on its own. Demanding that something become obsolete is quite suspicious.
I don't get you geeks nowadays.
Go try and browse the web with Netscape 4. I dare you.
I wish the deadline were Jan 2006. I mean, analog will still work until 2009. That means that if you bought an analog TV today, it would be fully functional for almost 4.5 years. Add to the 4.5 years however old an existing TV is. If your TV is OK for you in 2009, and you do not have cable or satellite, you are required to spend 50 bucks or so to hack your old TV to accept DTV signals.
I don't even know if most nonportable analog TVs even come with OTH antennas, so people have been used to buying and using addon antennas already for a while.
HDTV is the shit. Everyone, even wives, can clearly tell the difference. Its a good thing.
Why are my tax dollars being spent on subsidizing the purchase of a set-top box?
Would you rather have welfare do it instead?
Keep in mind that TV is a requirement to keep poor people quiet, non-thinking, and passive so they don't quit their low wage jobs. Think about it $40 a month is much less than actually paying employees or giving them benefits. Also, TV is full of those pretty ads to keep them consuming.
So the distinction between DTV, ATSC, and HDTV from a broadcasting perspective is really just a nitpick that can be ignored for all practical purposes.
But from a consumer perspective, a "Jan 2009 deadline for HDTV cutoff" sounds like, "Hmm, I need to buy one of those HDTVs because my old one won't work anymore."
In reality, by that time, at most, you will have a rabbit ear converter to take the DTV signal from the air and convert it to NTSC for your TV to display. I would guess that cable and satellite providers will do something similar.
So, I guess I'm stuck with the same 5 or so HDTV channels I have now until 2009? Great.
For the life of me I cannot figure out why HDTV is so slow in terms of content (and high cost). I mean, even Walmart and Target sell HDTVs, but to get a mere 5 or so ("Free") HDTV channels off of cable in my area, it costs almost $80 a month to get digital cable, a box, and pay for all of the hundreds of SDTV channels, where many of them look bad to begin with on an HDTV, and those channels actually look worse than analog cable because of the apparently high video compression levels they use on those channels.
Oh, while we are on content. I understood that part of Voom's "business model" was to have exclusive contracts with networks that have HDTV feeds. Now that Voom has demised more quickly than anticipated, does this mean that my cable company will have access to more HDTV channels?
Also, they have clear instructions on how to remove content from the archive here.
Even if the people doing the suing, are 100% correct in their claims. I don't see any harm that has been done, and simply removing the content should be more than sufficient.
I thought of that too. I didn't see in the article where they asked such a thing first.
One other thing. The article and slashdot summary says:
Last week Healthcare Advocates sued both the Harding Earley firm and the Internet Archive, saying the access to its old Web pages, stored in the Internet Archive's database, was unauthorized and illegal.
OK. Usually when something is illegal, you call the authorities and they are more than willing to take care of it for you. I love it how corporations have become the new police and district attorneys in this country. I guess that frees up the real police and DAs to put people in jail/prison for getting high.
However, if I were the judge, I would find for the plaintiff, and award them their damages.
Nothing. But assure them that they were in the right, and that they are welcome to sue the Internet Archive again and again if they want. After a while, it will not become worth the time and legal fees to continue to get zero compensation.
How much does a good healthy meal with vegetables cost vs. McDonald's. You do the math.
Less. They didn't do the math. Ground beef is about $3/pound. Actually, most food is around $3/pound. McDonalds is $4/meal and much less than a total pound of food.
Re:I agree. The very idea of such a penalty is evi
on
Death Penalty For Hackers?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You know, on a global scale, how we define "poor" and "poverty" is kind of silly....
Yet in the western world, we define "poverty" as not being able to afford broad-band, or only having one game console, or only having basic cable.
Waaay offtopic, but lets play.
Poor, rich, poverty, money, and all of that are manmade objects. They are not real in "the real world". I would bet that a motivated homeless person eating out of trashcans here in the US can probably eat better than a majority of the people in the "3rd" or "4th" world countries.
Poor, rich, and all that is relative. Being at the bottom of any list is not desirable. I used to think the same thing, that the US people don't know poverty, but if you've ever had the pleasure of really knowing a poor person, wow. They are different, and at the bottom for a reason.
If you can't afford broadband and other junk, you are not as skilled and successful as other people comparatively, so your respect and dignity goes down in comparison of those people. Its that simple.
Also, a trick to remember is that poor is a state of mind, its not a level of the amount of money you have. If I were to rob Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, and leave him pennyless, I doubt he would instantly become "poor". On the inverse, I don't consider people with no money by choice poor. Take Jesus or Mother Theresa as examples. To my knowledge neither of these people had cash, but they are not poor icons, nor are they ever considered poor.
It doesn't really matter what the TLD is. Internet-enabled phones will provide a way to enter it expediently.
Yeah, there is the thing for the web called google that does the same thing.
TLDs have simply gotten to be cash cows for those registrars out there, the sleezier the better!
I mean, who would have thunk that going to http://slashdot.com/ would get you to slashdot.org? Heck, I remember when you would introduce slashdot to someone and you tell them to go to slashdot.org and they would type http://www.slashdot.com/ and I would have to correct them twice. Slashdot used to not answer to www.slashdot.org only slashdot.org. The.com did not work at all.
With all of the cybersquatting and registrars buying up generic names for domains, I just go to google to find a url, not blindly type in the address into my browser unless its a known one already.
I guess I'm in the vast minority here, but I would _never_ use the Intel compiler on an AMD based system. Brief background, I work in the HPC market, and compiler decisions are important there. I am looking at possibly buying Opterons on the next purchase.
I've never heard of these issues until today, but I would never assume that the Intel compiler would be the best choice for AMD or other x86 chips. Again, I'm in the minority here, but under what assumption would someone think that the Intel compiler would be best compiler for other processors?
For Alpha's, I use the Compaq compiler that is for Alpha CPUs. For Intel machines, I use the Intel compiler. On Sparcs, I use Sun's compiler. I'm looking at buying Opterons, and I never considered using the Intel compiler on those machines. Why? There are no flags or optimized code generation for the Opteron or their specific way that they do 64bit instructions. Now the Portland Group compiler and the PathScale compiler are highly optimized for both AMD and Intel chips.
Now, what do I use for general non-performance specific codes?
GCC. I use GCC on Sparcs, Alphas, PPC, AMD and Intel processors daily. I nowhere expect GCC to perform as well as the Sun's compiler for Sparcs, or any other architecture specific. I just expect it to work, and the flags and warning and error messages are things that I'm familiar with.
Oh, and for what its worth, I have not seen anywhere on Intel's compiler site, nor in its documentation where it even mentions AMD processors or optimizations.
The product is clearly labeled as a high performance compiler for Intel CPUs. The grandparent used the wrong tool for the job which required a generic compiler.
Something like this would never be implemented in an open source compiler.
So go use gcc.
Oh, you want fast performance too.
I seriously doubt that Intel wrote code to cripple the AMD. Its much more likely that Intel does a switch statement over all of the known Intel CPUs for a specific fast memcpy() and has a default case for the unknown including future Intel chips that is failsafe.
Now if Intel did intentionally cripple the performance on an AMD, shame on them.
However, if the program detects an "Authentic AMD" microprocessor, it executes a different code path that will degrade the program's performance or cause it to crash.
If that statement is true, wouldn't there be programs all over that ran fine on Intel but crashed on AMD? Maybe there are and I haven't noticed? Maybe not many people use Intel compilers?
I don't know if this is true or not. AMD used to feel very comfortable using Intel's compiler to publish their benchmarks to SPEC and whatnot. Maybe they will have to use their own (after they make it).
Now, there is some nonconspiracy theory here. AMD and Intel chips do have different capabilities, and I would assume that Intel's compiler would use, at most, zero of those that are exclusive to AMD and all of the bells and whistles of all of the Intel chips.
Yeah. But Divx just sucked. You "buy" a Divx disc, take it home to your Divx player that has to be hooked up to a land phone line, and you and your wife, sons and daughters have to be off the phone (and/or computer) so the player can phone home and decrement your watch count. So, you like the movie, take it over to a friends house. Odds are they don't have a Divx player, and even if so, the prerequisites must also be met.
Oh, but no matter how much you like the movie, it will self-destruct soon anyway.
Technology is only adopted by "normal" people if it adds something, even if it is inferior quality (MP3 anybody). Even if MP3s were pennies a piece, but had to be played in special players that required a phone jack, nobody would be interested.
Easier said than done. I refuse to pay for a DVD either by purchase or rental if they have ads embedded at the beginning that lock out the remote control, and have done that for about 5 years or so.
I don't buy or rent many DVDs anymore and have not been plagued by this "feature", but I hear that it still exists, so somebody must be putting up with it.
Yeah your right. The 720 is the horizontal resolution of DVDs not vertical. Its much more clear that they only gave 1/2 of the resolution for people. Maybe they should have gone with the computer resolution of VGA, SVGA, W-SVGA, WXVGA, to be more clear.
Now that explains why they look so bad compared to HDTV. But I'm now a little confused. If DVDs are only 720x480 and NTSC regular TV is 640x480. Why do they look better than standard TV? Hmm.
There must be some relationship between screen size and the perceptible difference. For example, can people see more detail on a 42" screen if one is 480p and the other is 720p?
Maybe the extra inch does it, but on my 43" HDTV I can easily tell 480p (progressive scan NTSC or "Standard def"), 720p (DVD quality), and 1080i (da shit).
I almost exclusively watch HDTV content. After a while, DVDs don't look that good anymore, and I'm a little miffed about this new DRM scam because I would like to buy a HDDVD player soon so that DVDs look better.
Textbook Publishers Association of America. Yeah, I made it up, but we simply cannot allow for progress against an old business models. Trifles innovation, hurts the authors, and leaves the suits worried.
While, the IA64 has always had great floating point performance, there's an awful lot of us out here that don't need fast FPUs -- e.g. code development, database, web serving, network i/o etc.
1) Code development. Well, being that the compiler does most all of the optimizations on the IA64 platform, and compilation takes a long time because of this, well, developers will just have to make good Makefiles and wait on long compiles like they always have.
2) Database. Its good to have contiguous large (> 2Gigs) of RAM on a process. Its good to have fast disk IO (independent of CPU). Its good to have high memory bandwidth. Itaniums are pretty good for the job, and aside from number crunching, databases are the #2 use for Itaniums.
3) Web serving -- hmm, usually web servers are IO or database bound. See #2 for databases, but I think anyone using an Itanium as a dedicated web server would be pretty dumb.
The BIOS replacement they use is not functional. It's very difficult to set up disks for use, and if you lose the disk that the BIOS data is kept on, you're screwed.
Maybe this is a Windows thing, but otherwise, I don't know what you are talking about. To my knowledge, all Itaniums use EFI and not a BIOS. BIOSes are a hippie 70s thing.
Support for the Itaniums has been terrible. The HP systems are riddled with hardware problems, and their support personnel (at the enterprise level) have no idea how to comprehend that they don't operate quite like any other workstation.
Again, this may be a windows thing. I've had a very good relationship with HP and our Itaniums. If you consider the problems I have had over the past 2.5 years or so with things like commodity harddrives and memory, which were quickly fixed onsite. I've found HP's support to be exceptional, and the hardware has been exceptional as well. I guess your experience was different.
I may be entirely wrong, but I believe the dislike for the Itanium stems from the fact that you can't compile any decently optimized code for it. Apparently, even Intel can't create a good compiler/linker and toolkit for creating machine code that makes good use of EPIC.
Well, a linker has little to do with CPUs or performance, they just glue modules together.
Intel's compiler is excellent. I've witnessed a 100% speedup by going from -O2 to -O3 optimization level on one code.
The GCC compiler is not bad on the Itanium. Usable for system stuff.
Even though the processor itself is more efficient and faster, the same thing compiled to machine code running side by side with an Opteron or any other x86-64 chip will see the x86 win.
Maybe under some situations (with small memory programs with highly coupled CPU cache utilization), but as a general rule, this is not true.
If somebody could come up with a decent compiler/linker that provided full EPIC optimizations, they would be bangin, but they don't have it so we don't use it./i.
As a general rule, the best compilers for a CPU come from the people that make the CPU. The biggest exception to that is AMD, because they do not provide compilers, however the Pathscale and Portland Group compilers are good for AMD chips. Also, its ironic that a majority of the AMD Athlon and Opteron benchmarks that are published are done with code compiled with the Intel compiler. This was especially true when the 1st Opterons came out. The benchmarks that were published were often 32bit codes compiled with the Intel compiler.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not forget Mosaic, upon which Netscape was built.
And IE.
Still, I havea great fondness for the big, pulsing, waiting for 56K dial up N that was Netscape in the early days.
Hmm, you had 56K "in the early days" with pulsing Ns? The rest of us had much slower connections.
If there was no longer a need for something, it would become obsolete on its own. Demanding that something become obsolete is quite suspicious.
I don't get you geeks nowadays.
Go try and browse the web with Netscape 4. I dare you.
I wish the deadline were Jan 2006. I mean, analog will still work until 2009. That means that if you bought an analog TV today, it would be fully functional for almost 4.5 years. Add to the 4.5 years however old an existing TV is. If your TV is OK for you in 2009, and you do not have cable or satellite, you are required to spend 50 bucks or so to hack your old TV to accept DTV signals.
I don't even know if most nonportable analog TVs even come with OTH antennas, so people have been used to buying and using addon antennas already for a while.
HDTV is the shit. Everyone, even wives, can clearly tell the difference. Its a good thing.
Why are my tax dollars being spent on subsidizing the purchase of a set-top box?
Would you rather have welfare do it instead?
Keep in mind that TV is a requirement to keep poor people quiet, non-thinking, and passive so they don't quit their low wage jobs. Think about it $40 a month is much less than actually paying employees or giving them benefits. Also, TV is full of those pretty ads to keep them consuming.
I don't think its that bad.
So the distinction between DTV, ATSC, and HDTV from a broadcasting perspective is really just a nitpick that can be ignored for all practical purposes.
But from a consumer perspective, a "Jan 2009 deadline for HDTV cutoff" sounds like, "Hmm, I need to buy one of those HDTVs because my old one won't work anymore."
In reality, by that time, at most, you will have a rabbit ear converter to take the DTV signal from the air and convert it to NTSC for your TV to display. I would guess that cable and satellite providers will do something similar.
So, I guess I'm stuck with the same 5 or so HDTV channels I have now until 2009? Great.
For the life of me I cannot figure out why HDTV is so slow in terms of content (and high cost). I mean, even Walmart and Target sell HDTVs, but to get a mere 5 or so ("Free") HDTV channels off of cable in my area, it costs almost $80 a month to get digital cable, a box, and pay for all of the hundreds of SDTV channels, where many of them look bad to begin with on an HDTV, and those channels actually look worse than analog cable because of the apparently high video compression levels they use on those channels.
Oh, while we are on content. I understood that part of Voom's "business model" was to have exclusive contracts with networks that have HDTV feeds. Now that Voom has demised more quickly than anticipated, does this mean that my cable company will have access to more HDTV channels?
Actually, that is what the Internet Archive claims to be. http://www.archive.org/about/about.php
Also, they have clear instructions on how to remove content from the archive here.
Even if the people doing the suing, are 100% correct in their claims. I don't see any harm that has been done, and simply removing the content should be more than sufficient.
why not just ask them to take them off?
I thought of that too. I didn't see in the article where they asked such a thing first.
One other thing. The article and slashdot summary says:
Last week Healthcare Advocates sued both the Harding Earley firm and the Internet Archive, saying the access to its old Web pages, stored in the Internet Archive's database, was unauthorized and illegal.
OK. Usually when something is illegal, you call the authorities and they are more than willing to take care of it for you. I love it how corporations have become the new police and district attorneys in this country. I guess that frees up the real police and DAs to put people in jail/prison for getting high.
However, if I were the judge, I would find for the plaintiff, and award them their damages.
Nothing. But assure them that they were in the right, and that they are welcome to sue the Internet Archive again and again if they want. After a while, it will not become worth the time and legal fees to continue to get zero compensation.
How much does a good healthy meal with vegetables cost vs. McDonald's. You do the math.
Less. They didn't do the math. Ground beef is about $3/pound. Actually, most food is around $3/pound. McDonalds is $4/meal and much less than a total pound of food.
You know, on a global scale, how we define "poor" and "poverty" is kind of silly. ...
Yet in the western world, we define "poverty" as not being able to afford broad-band, or only having one game console, or only having basic cable.
Waaay offtopic, but lets play.
Poor, rich, poverty, money, and all of that are manmade objects. They are not real in "the real world". I would bet that a motivated homeless person eating out of trashcans here in the US can probably eat better than a majority of the people in the "3rd" or "4th" world countries.
Poor, rich, and all that is relative. Being at the bottom of any list is not desirable. I used to think the same thing, that the US people don't know poverty, but if you've ever had the pleasure of really knowing a poor person, wow. They are different, and at the bottom for a reason.
If you can't afford broadband and other junk, you are not as skilled and successful as other people comparatively, so your respect and dignity goes down in comparison of those people. Its that simple.
Also, a trick to remember is that poor is a state of mind, its not a level of the amount of money you have. If I were to rob Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, and leave him pennyless, I doubt he would instantly become "poor". On the inverse, I don't consider people with no money by choice poor. Take Jesus or Mother Theresa as examples. To my knowledge neither of these people had cash, but they are not poor icons, nor are they ever considered poor.
Remember, poor people suck, just ask Kenny.
It doesn't really matter what the TLD is. Internet-enabled phones will provide a way to enter it expediently.
.com did not work at all.
Yeah, there is the thing for the web called google that does the same thing.
TLDs have simply gotten to be cash cows for those registrars out there, the sleezier the better!
I mean, who would have thunk that going to http://slashdot.com/ would get you to slashdot.org? Heck, I remember when you would introduce slashdot to someone and you tell them to go to slashdot.org and they would type http://www.slashdot.com/ and I would have to correct them twice. Slashdot used to not answer to www.slashdot.org only slashdot.org. The
With all of the cybersquatting and registrars buying up generic names for domains, I just go to google to find a url, not blindly type in the address into my browser unless its a known one already.
Now ask yourself again: do you believe that it's PURE COINCIDENCE that Intel's compiler produces slow code for its competitor's processors?
Do you believe that it is pure coincidence that Intel's compiler produces fast code for their processor?
I guess I'm in the vast minority here, but I would _never_ use the Intel compiler on an AMD based system. Brief background, I work in the HPC market, and compiler decisions are important there. I am looking at possibly buying Opterons on the next purchase.
I've never heard of these issues until today, but I would never assume that the Intel compiler would be the best choice for AMD or other x86 chips. Again, I'm in the minority here, but under what assumption would someone think that the Intel compiler would be best compiler for other processors?
For Alpha's, I use the Compaq compiler that is for Alpha CPUs. For Intel machines, I use the Intel compiler. On Sparcs, I use Sun's compiler. I'm looking at buying Opterons, and I never considered using the Intel compiler on those machines. Why? There are no flags or optimized code generation for the Opteron or their specific way that they do 64bit instructions. Now the Portland Group compiler and the PathScale compiler are highly optimized for both AMD and Intel chips.
Now, what do I use for general non-performance specific codes?
GCC. I use GCC on Sparcs, Alphas, PPC, AMD and Intel processors daily. I nowhere expect GCC to perform as well as the Sun's compiler for Sparcs, or any other architecture specific. I just expect it to work, and the flags and warning and error messages are things that I'm familiar with.
Oh, and for what its worth, I have not seen anywhere on Intel's compiler site, nor in its documentation where it even mentions AMD processors or optimizations.
5. Repost article on Slashdot.
6. Repeat.
Wow... that's a great example, and you should gather as much evidence of it as you can, especially Intel's responses, and send it to AMD's legal team.
/ eng/compilers/clin/index.htm or here http://www.intelcompiler.com/.
If I were Intel, I would respond with the product description of the Intel compiler, as found here http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na
The product is clearly labeled as a high performance compiler for Intel CPUs. The grandparent used the wrong tool for the job which required a generic compiler.
Something like this would never be implemented in an open source compiler.
So go use gcc.
Oh, you want fast performance too.
I seriously doubt that Intel wrote code to cripple the AMD. Its much more likely that Intel does a switch statement over all of the known Intel CPUs for a specific fast memcpy() and has a default case for the unknown including future Intel chips that is failsafe.
Now if Intel did intentionally cripple the performance on an AMD, shame on them.
However, if the program detects an "Authentic AMD" microprocessor, it executes a different code path that will degrade the program's performance or cause it to crash.
If that statement is true, wouldn't there be programs all over that ran fine on Intel but crashed on AMD? Maybe there are and I haven't noticed? Maybe not many people use Intel compilers?
I don't know if this is true or not. AMD used to feel very comfortable using Intel's compiler to publish their benchmarks to SPEC and whatnot. Maybe they will have to use their own (after they make it).
Now, there is some nonconspiracy theory here. AMD and Intel chips do have different capabilities, and I would assume that Intel's compiler would use, at most, zero of those that are exclusive to AMD and all of the bells and whistles of all of the Intel chips.
Anyone remember Divx?
Yeah. But Divx just sucked. You "buy" a Divx disc, take it home to your Divx player that has to be hooked up to a land phone line, and you and your wife, sons and daughters have to be off the phone (and/or computer) so the player can phone home and decrement your watch count. So, you like the movie, take it over to a friends house. Odds are they don't have a Divx player, and even if so, the prerequisites must also be met.
Oh, but no matter how much you like the movie, it will self-destruct soon anyway.
Technology is only adopted by "normal" people if it adds something, even if it is inferior quality (MP3 anybody). Even if MP3s were pennies a piece, but had to be played in special players that required a phone jack, nobody would be interested.
Just don't buy it.
The market will teach them to stop doing that.
Easier said than done. I refuse to pay for a DVD either by purchase or rental if they have ads embedded at the beginning that lock out the remote control, and have done that for about 5 years or so.
I don't buy or rent many DVDs anymore and have not been plagued by this "feature", but I hear that it still exists, so somebody must be putting up with it.
Yeah your right. The 720 is the horizontal resolution of DVDs not vertical. Its much more clear that they only gave 1/2 of the resolution for people. Maybe they should have gone with the computer resolution of VGA, SVGA, W-SVGA, WXVGA, to be more clear.
Now that explains why they look so bad compared to HDTV. But I'm now a little confused. If DVDs are only 720x480 and NTSC regular TV is 640x480. Why do they look better than standard TV? Hmm.
There must be some relationship between screen size and the perceptible difference. For example, can people see more detail on a 42" screen if one is 480p and the other is 720p?
Maybe the extra inch does it, but on my 43" HDTV I can easily tell 480p (progressive scan NTSC or "Standard def"), 720p (DVD quality), and 1080i (da shit).
I almost exclusively watch HDTV content. After a while, DVDs don't look that good anymore, and I'm a little miffed about this new DRM scam because I would like to buy a HDDVD player soon so that DVDs look better.
The funniest part is that no one would want to bootleg over the component connections anyway.
Yeah, nobody would buy a bootleg of a movie that is done by some cheesy analog capture method like a camcorder in front of a screen.
TPAA!
Textbook Publishers Association of America. Yeah, I made it up, but we simply cannot allow for progress against an old business models. Trifles innovation, hurts the authors, and leaves the suits worried.
While, the IA64 has always had great floating point performance, there's an awful lot of us out here that don't need fast FPUs -- e.g. code development, database, web serving, network i/o etc.
1) Code development. Well, being that the compiler does most all of the optimizations on the IA64 platform, and compilation takes a long time because of this, well, developers will just have to make good Makefiles and wait on long compiles like they always have.
2) Database. Its good to have contiguous large (> 2Gigs) of RAM on a process. Its good to have fast disk IO (independent of CPU). Its good to have high memory bandwidth. Itaniums are pretty good for the job, and aside from number crunching, databases are the #2 use for Itaniums.
3) Web serving -- hmm, usually web servers are IO or database bound. See #2 for databases, but I think anyone using an Itanium as a dedicated web server would be pretty dumb.
4) network IO -- not an issue for Itaniums.
The BIOS replacement they use is not functional. It's very difficult to set up disks for use, and if you lose the disk that the BIOS data is kept on, you're screwed.
Maybe this is a Windows thing, but otherwise, I don't know what you are talking about. To my knowledge, all Itaniums use EFI and not a BIOS. BIOSes are a hippie 70s thing.
Support for the Itaniums has been terrible. The HP systems are riddled with hardware problems, and their support personnel (at the enterprise level) have no idea how to comprehend that they don't operate quite like any other workstation.
Again, this may be a windows thing. I've had a very good relationship with HP and our Itaniums. If you consider the problems I have had over the past 2.5 years or so with things like commodity harddrives and memory, which were quickly fixed onsite. I've found HP's support to be exceptional, and the hardware has been exceptional as well. I guess your experience was different.
Now, what was the topic again????
I may be entirely wrong, but I believe the dislike for the Itanium stems from the fact that you can't compile any decently optimized code for it. Apparently, even Intel can't create a good compiler/linker and toolkit for creating machine code that makes good use of EPIC.
Well, a linker has little to do with CPUs or performance, they just glue modules together.
Intel's compiler is excellent. I've witnessed a 100% speedup by going from -O2 to -O3 optimization level on one code.
The GCC compiler is not bad on the Itanium. Usable for system stuff.
Even though the processor itself is more efficient and faster, the same thing compiled to machine code running side by side with an Opteron or any other x86-64 chip will see the x86 win.
Maybe under some situations (with small memory programs with highly coupled CPU cache utilization), but as a general rule, this is not true.
If somebody could come up with a decent compiler/linker that provided full EPIC optimizations, they would be bangin, but they don't have it so we don't use it./i.
As a general rule, the best compilers for a CPU come from the people that make the CPU. The biggest exception to that is AMD, because they do not provide compilers, however the Pathscale and Portland Group compilers are good for AMD chips. Also, its ironic that a majority of the AMD Athlon and Opteron benchmarks that are published are done with code compiled with the Intel compiler. This was especially true when the 1st Opterons came out. The benchmarks that were published were often 32bit codes compiled with the Intel compiler.
Itaniums do run 32bit applications. At least for Linux.
However, if your running a 32bit OS on a 64bit machine, something is not right.