especially for some applications like public key crypto algorithms.
Oh, here we go again with the crypto.
You fail to mention that crypto is the ONLY application where Itanium (1) was any good at -- it has a lot of shift units. Is McKinley going to be the same story? Great crypto performance, really crappy integer / everything else performance?
McKinley had better be better than that, or its going to get the same lukewarm reception as the Itanium.
And they do seem to be having the same difficulties of pushing the clockspeed to decent levels as they did with Itanium. It was only by the C-rev of the original Itanium (the last pre-production beta chip realease) that they achieved 800Mhz, while the original target, I believe, was over 1Ghz.
Its sad, since we all thought McKinley, being desgined more by HP and less by Intel, would have good performance besides SSL.
Not to mention 130 watts of power consumption. And you thought Athlons were hard to cool!
Its not pretty. The 4-CPU Itanium 1 systems are composed almost entirely of fans on the front to create a sort-of wind tunnel for the damn CPUs.
When you turn the machine on, there's so much interference on fan spinup that all the monitors around you degauss:)
If HP has been consitent on one front, its that PA-RISC is being phased out and IA-64 phased in.
The question is how fast, and how long will the be able to milk the PA-RISC for all the support. (But they're not even betting on that too much it seems, since the IA-64 HP-UX comes with PA-RISC binary emulation -- its really more of runtime translation than emulation -- you get about 80% orignal speed, pretty nifty:) )
This might be a huge surprise to you, but a very large perentage of Linux apps (over 90%) port to linux ia-64 without any modifications. This is largely thanks to the fact that linux already runs on 64-bit architectures -- Alpha, Sparc, etc. and most apps have been adapted to that already. There's not much conceptual difference in the high-level programmer's view between IA64 and any other 64-bit linux platform.
They already have a "Linux compatibility layer" on their x86 solaris -- it is basically a load-time translator which understands Linux's ELF and translates linux system and library calls into their solaris equivalent. This works because they're both on x86. I don't know how they plan to do this on SPARC, without a recompile of the app for SPARC.
I do know that, for example, HP-UX on Itanium has (or will soon have) this capability, but of course only for linux Itanium binaries).
All this is cool, and is basically leading to the commoditization of OS -- binaries run on anything, which is what we'd have in an ideal world:)
The Buran is really not much better. Its much more expensive to fly that the shuttle, + a few of them blew up in development. Russia only flew it _once_ for a reason!
Tons of nuclear waste are already being transported on the roads and rivers of the US.
How do you think weapon's grade uranium, or the fuel for power plants is transported?
The transport methods are not new and untested, but tried-and-true methods used for 50 years.
First of all, this is blatant offtopic advertising, and should be modded as such.
Second of all this is an old idea on Linux -- both gnome and KDE have a taskbar newsticker which supports many different site feeds.
Forget what the gnome one is called, and
KNewsTicker for KDE.
Well, that is at least partially true.
When the 9/11 attacks happened in NY, Verizon's central office near the tower was damaged.
It still kept working for about 12 hours (not the 2 days you claim) on generator power, etc, before finally giving way.
It took about a month until I got my DSL back, even though I'm miles from Manhattan!
It turned out that Verizon's lines weren't nearly as redundant as they thought.
I suppose they will need a successful and well accepted rollout of Itanium products with an associated push towards Linux to resurrect themselves there.
Yeah, and thats exactly why they cut their Itanium division in NJ a few months ago.:-/
Sadly, recently at HP, the right hand does not seem to know what the left is doing.
While I realize that its reliability is more than proven to most of us here, it's important that it be proven to executives as well.
No, its not proven, at all!
Because you ran your Linux boxen at home and work without powering down for a year doesn't prove anything. You haven't gotten your machines even close to the level of load that enterprise server machines handle each day.
Also, most of us run uniprocessor or 2-CPU machines. Not too much stuff is being done on the 32-CPU enterprise machines with Gigs and Gigs of RAM, hundreds of disks, network connections, and PCI buses.
Linux has not been proven in these environments at all. And even if you say that it runs on those machines, when you install an OS on a $1 million machine, you better damn be sure its proven to be reliable.
Now, big Uni*es -- Sun, IBM, HP, etc. have entire teams of people running stress tests on these machines, and (as a former developer of HP-UX) I know that developers must run through at least 12 hours of stress testing a system (thats a system running through automated test suites that excercise every subsystem, and get system load averages to about 200 consistently) when making kernel changes. These things are TESTED
Noone does that with linux, because noone wants to do it -- its not fun work at all. But the companys do do it, and must do it, since they must guarantee 99.99% uptime for the "executives" to buy the system.
You probably are referring to "Speakeasy" DSL (here)
They provide static IP / SDSL / pick your POP, etc services. They also allow you to run anything you want on your DSL line (servers, IPsec, anything except child porn I guess:) )
Their news server sucks however (they outsource it). They're also relying on Covad's network currently, and Covad is not in the greatest financial condition right now. But they do claim they have "backup plans" if Covad goes belly-up.
Well, I don't agree about the weather -- most commercial aircraft fly above cloud level.
The problem of course is night flying!
You'd effectively be restricting flights to daytime only. (And this would be a big problem for long flights -- there'd be only a tiny flight start window to get sunlight during the whole flight.)
Do you think that since its Palm IIIxe compatible you could just flash it with the PalmOS?
If so, it can be a cheap memory upgrade for my 2MB Palm III while keeping the old one for someone..
'Cause the only thing that makes a Palm great is all the software and SDKs for it.
You can easily compile and install bash on HP-UX. (I've done it in under 2 minutes.)
Also, there are people committed to distribution of most popular GNU tools in binary for HP-UX and other commercial *NIXes, even though most compile and install from source without problems.
(with the notable exception of gcc of course. Sheeesh -- try and get THAT to compile cleanly!)
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especially for some applications like public key crypto algorithms.
Oh, here we go again with the crypto.You fail to mention that crypto is the ONLY application where Itanium (1) was any good at -- it has a lot of shift units. Is McKinley going to be the same story? Great crypto performance, really crappy integer / everything else performance?
McKinley had better be better than that, or its going to get the same lukewarm reception as the Itanium.
And they do seem to be having the same difficulties of pushing the clockspeed to decent levels as they did with Itanium. It was only by the C-rev of the original Itanium (the last pre-production beta chip realease) that they achieved 800Mhz, while the original target, I believe, was over 1Ghz.
Its sad, since we all thought McKinley, being desgined more by HP and less by Intel, would have good performance besides SSL.
Its not pretty. The 4-CPU Itanium 1 systems are composed almost entirely of fans on the front to create a sort-of wind tunnel for the damn CPUs. :)
When you turn the machine on, there's so much interference on fan spinup that all the monitors around you degauss
If HP has been consitent on one front, its that PA-RISC is being phased out and IA-64 phased in. The question is how fast, and how long will the be able to milk the PA-RISC for all the support. (But they're not even betting on that too much it seems, since the IA-64 HP-UX comes with PA-RISC binary emulation -- its really more of runtime translation than emulation -- you get about 80% orignal speed, pretty nifty :) )
This might be a huge surprise to you, but a very large perentage of Linux apps (over 90%) port to linux ia-64 without any modifications.
This is largely thanks to the fact that linux already runs on 64-bit architectures -- Alpha, Sparc, etc. and most apps have been adapted to that already. There's not much conceptual difference in the high-level programmer's view between IA64 and any other 64-bit linux platform.
The fact that it boots, does not mean it'll perform well!
The main trick is not _supporting_ 32 CPU's, its using them effectively!
Yeah, and the next version of 11i on Itanium (IA64) will support binary compatibility with Itanium linux binaries as well.
They already have a "Linux compatibility layer" on their x86 solaris --
:)
it is basically a load-time translator which understands Linux's ELF and translates linux system and library calls into their solaris equivalent. This works because they're both on x86.
I don't know how they plan to do this on SPARC, without a recompile of the app for SPARC.
I do know that, for example, HP-UX on Itanium has (or will soon have) this capability, but of course only for linux Itanium binaries).
All this is cool, and is basically leading to the commoditization of OS -- binaries run on anything, which is what we'd have in an ideal world
The Buran is really not much better.
Its much more expensive to fly that the shuttle, + a few of them blew up in development.
Russia only flew it _once_ for a reason!
Tons of nuclear waste are already being transported on the roads and rivers of the US.
How do you think weapon's grade uranium, or the fuel for power plants is transported?
The transport methods are not new and untested, but tried-and-true methods used for 50 years.
Second of all this is an old idea on Linux -- both gnome and KDE have a taskbar newsticker which supports many different site feeds. Forget what the gnome one is called, and KNewsTicker for KDE.
When the 9/11 attacks happened in NY, Verizon's central office near the tower was damaged.
It still kept working for about 12 hours (not the 2 days you claim) on generator power, etc, before finally giving way.
It took about a month until I got my DSL back, even though I'm miles from Manhattan! It turned out that Verizon's lines weren't nearly as redundant as they thought.
Yeah, and thats exactly why they cut their Itanium division in NJ a few months ago. :-/
Sadly, recently at HP, the right hand does not seem to know what the left is doing.
No, its not proven, at all!
Because you ran your Linux boxen at home and work without powering down for a year doesn't prove anything. You haven't gotten your machines even close to the level of load that enterprise server machines handle each day. Also, most of us run uniprocessor or 2-CPU machines. Not too much stuff is being done on the 32-CPU enterprise machines with Gigs and Gigs of RAM, hundreds of disks, network connections, and PCI buses.
Linux has not been proven in these environments at all. And even if you say that it runs on those machines, when you install an OS on a $1 million machine, you better damn be sure its proven to be reliable.
Now, big Uni*es -- Sun, IBM, HP, etc. have entire teams of people running stress tests on these machines, and (as a former developer of HP-UX) I know that developers must run through at least 12 hours of stress testing a system (thats a system running through automated test suites that excercise every subsystem, and get system load averages to about 200 consistently) when making kernel changes. These things are TESTED
Noone does that with linux, because noone wants to do it -- its not fun work at all. But the companys do do it, and must do it, since they must guarantee 99.99% uptime for the "executives" to buy the system.
So don't blame them for not jumping on Linux.
You probably are referring to "Speakeasy" DSL (here) :) )
They provide static IP / SDSL / pick your POP, etc services. They also allow you to run anything you want on your DSL line (servers, IPsec, anything except child porn I guess
Their news server sucks however (they outsource it). They're also relying on Covad's network currently, and Covad is not in the greatest financial condition right now. But they do claim they have "backup plans" if Covad goes belly-up.
Well, I don't agree about the weather -- most commercial aircraft fly above cloud level.
The problem of course is night flying!
You'd effectively be restricting flights to daytime only. (And this would be a big problem for long flights -- there'd be only a tiny flight start window to get sunlight during the whole flight.)
Do you think that since its Palm IIIxe compatible you could just flash it with the PalmOS?
If so, it can be a cheap memory upgrade for my 2MB Palm III while keeping the old one for someone..
'Cause the only thing that makes a Palm great is all the software and SDKs for it.
You can easily compile and install bash on HP-UX.
(I've done it in under 2 minutes.)
Also, there are people committed to distribution of most popular GNU tools in binary for HP-UX and other commercial *NIXes, even though most compile and install from source without problems.
(with the notable exception of gcc of course. Sheeesh -- try and get THAT to compile cleanly!)