By your standards, DEC must be one of the most successful computer companies in the world - its operating system evolved into the top desktop and server operating system on the planet, after all.
Oh, and the top two mobile OS's are Symbian and Android.
It would be unpopular in the US, due to fiscal reasons, and internationally, because the Western Europeans and their friends seem to think that killing is evil, No Matter What. These are the same morons that bitched about Saddam Hussein's execution.
The US supported Diem's removal, although not his execution. He was ultimately replaced with Nguyen Van Thieu, who was crazy and autocratic but not nearly as outright evil.
Power7 is quite efficient, but also costs thousands of dollars. There are some embedded-market PPC chips that do okay though - you can get performance comparable with a low-end/midrange Nehalem, but the downside is that they cost far more than they should ($300+) and have hardly any software.
ARM sucks. Go look up its SPEC2000 results and see.
Yeah, outside the US, Itanium is big on mainframes. Fujitsu, NEC, Bull, and (I think) Hitachi all run proprietary mainframe OS's on IA64, and at least in their home countries they do a pretty good business.
The fact that there was any meaningful Linux/Windows support was a vestige of the time when Intel saw a future where Itanium would replace commodity processors at the low end. Neither SPARC nor POWER has Windows support, and SPARC doesn't have any Linux support from a major distribution either. This is because Nobody Cares about Linux for enterprise platforms, except for consolidating x86 workloads... and IBM is the only company aggressively going after that market anyway. The vast majority of high-end enterprise servers run UNIX or proprietary operating systems.
Just because you run Linux in your basement doesn't mean it dominates high-end servers.
Poulson is likely to ship Q1 of 2012, shortly before IBM's Power7+ refresh is likely. It'll be competitive enough, especially if P7+ is a shitty refresh like P6+ was. (It had slightly improved power characteristics and no performance enhancements.)
Oh, please. Unlike Power, which if you look at the sales numbers has had an awful few months, Itanium is doing pretty damn well. $4bn to $5bn with reliable growth (feeding off Oracle's neglect of M-series SPARC) is a good place to be. Additionally, if Poulson came out today, it would probably be the fastest processor in the world (4-6x the raw performance of the Itanium 9300 should put it slightly ahead of Power7).
Itanium is the #2 high-end UNIX server processor, ahead of SPARC but behind POWER. Itanium systems get between $4bn and $5bn and sales, and are growing. It didn't meet the original goal of taking over the world, but I don't know what parallel universe you live in to think it's a failure.
It looks like it's just going to execute two threads in parallel, with an instruction bundle from each thread every cycle. That shouldn't be too bad, as long as you have two CPU-bound threads... this almost looks like it's comparable to a 16-core "Tukwila."
Slashdot broke my comment. The first line should have been "a small (below 1 percent) number of WP7 devices have to pull out their battery and restart the phone after an update. Let's compare to the Galaxy S, which had, out of the box:"
Okay, so a small (
-Almost nonfunctional GPS an all devices
-Serious filesystem issues that cause the phone to get substantially slower when time goes by, due to the fact that they were running on an obscure FAT derivative (RFS)
-No OS updates for months. 2.2 has just been coming out in the past few weeks for Galaxy S, while 2.3 and 2.3.3 (two API levels ahead) are out.
Just trying to put things in perspective. Now, back to your regularly scheduled Microsoft bitching...
Are you people fucking retarded? There is NOTHING in common between an HPC cluster and a many-socket commercial database system except that they both have lots of processors. The vast majority of Big Systems are AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, OS/400, or one of the mainframe operating systems (OS 2200, MCP, z/OS, TPF).
The amount of ignorance masquerading as knowledge on Slashdot is truly frightening.
Linux isn't Unix, and for your information, Windows runs on over 50% of servers sold. Linux competes with Windows at the low end, and with Unix at the midrange. Mainframes and monster Unix systems own the high end (16 sockets or more).
More like 2000. A fast A9 is similar to an entry level Pentium 4 machine. That isn't enough to be on PC-replacement level just yet.
Give it another two generations, and see whether MIPS gets any traction. At least on paper, the 1074k core has equivalent performance and lower power than an A9 at the same speed. I think the next four years will be exciting for processor design.
Then there's the little problem that below 22nm (or 18, or maybe a little lower), all bets are off as far as whether Moore's Law continues to apply. We may very well be approaching the end of the "make computers faster by putting more transistors on a chip" phase of technological evolution.
Because social engineering is so totally an Uber Advanced Hacking Technique. Anyone who hands out a root password, enables remote root SSH access, and shuts off a firewall because of an email message is dangerously complacent.
WM6 had a huge app library, and the best thing was that you didn't have to get it from any kind of curated "app store." Software could be written in whatever programming language the developer felt like, and frequently went far beyond the "download data from a web API and display it" crap we get on Android/iPhone/WP7. WM6 had its issues, but "no software" was never one of them.
Ah, but the processor is faster than the Atrix*. 1.4GHz Snapdragon has the potential to be quite impressive, especially if they've done substantial microarchitectural improvements since the last-generation Snapdragons.
* The Tegra 2 isn't actually that fast. It's dual-core, but on a mobile phone you almost never have a case when you have two different CPU-bound threads - additionally, the cores themselves are crippled, as they don't have the NEON or VFP extensions. Nvidia's strategy with Tegra seems to be "let's hope everyone is distracted by our GPU that's 10% faster than an SGX, and doesn't notice our shitty cores."
Why wouldn't anyone buy the Pre 3 and TouchPad when there's competition? Why do you think that people are still going to buy Android devices when there's competition from the iPad and iPad 2? Your logic seems disturbingly like Android troll logic.
Slashdot Mirror
By your standards, DEC must be one of the most successful computer companies in the world - its operating system evolved into the top desktop and server operating system on the planet, after all.
Oh, and the top two mobile OS's are Symbian and Android.
It would be unpopular in the US, due to fiscal reasons, and internationally, because the Western Europeans and their friends seem to think that killing is evil, No Matter What. These are the same morons that bitched about Saddam Hussein's execution.
The US supported Diem's removal, although not his execution. He was ultimately replaced with Nguyen Van Thieu, who was crazy and autocratic but not nearly as outright evil.
Power7 is quite efficient, but also costs thousands of dollars. There are some embedded-market PPC chips that do okay though - you can get performance comparable with a low-end/midrange Nehalem, but the downside is that they cost far more than they should ($300+) and have hardly any software.
ARM sucks. Go look up its SPEC2000 results and see.
Yeah, outside the US, Itanium is big on mainframes. Fujitsu, NEC, Bull, and (I think) Hitachi all run proprietary mainframe OS's on IA64, and at least in their home countries they do a pretty good business.
"Major distribution," in this case, meant commercial support - since the parent had been complaining about lack of RHEL.
The fact that there was any meaningful Linux/Windows support was a vestige of the time when Intel saw a future where Itanium would replace commodity processors at the low end. Neither SPARC nor POWER has Windows support, and SPARC doesn't have any Linux support from a major distribution either. This is because Nobody Cares about Linux for enterprise platforms, except for consolidating x86 workloads... and IBM is the only company aggressively going after that market anyway. The vast majority of high-end enterprise servers run UNIX or proprietary operating systems.
Just because you run Linux in your basement doesn't mean it dominates high-end servers.
Poulson is likely to ship Q1 of 2012, shortly before IBM's Power7+ refresh is likely. It'll be competitive enough, especially if P7+ is a shitty refresh like P6+ was. (It had slightly improved power characteristics and no performance enhancements.)
Oh, please. Unlike Power, which if you look at the sales numbers has had an awful few months, Itanium is doing pretty damn well. $4bn to $5bn with reliable growth (feeding off Oracle's neglect of M-series SPARC) is a good place to be. Additionally, if Poulson came out today, it would probably be the fastest processor in the world (4-6x the raw performance of the Itanium 9300 should put it slightly ahead of Power7).
Itanium is the #2 high-end UNIX server processor, ahead of SPARC but behind POWER. Itanium systems get between $4bn and $5bn and sales, and are growing. It didn't meet the original goal of taking over the world, but I don't know what parallel universe you live in to think it's a failure.
It looks like it's just going to execute two threads in parallel, with an instruction bundle from each thread every cycle. That shouldn't be too bad, as long as you have two CPU-bound threads... this almost looks like it's comparable to a 16-core "Tukwila."
http://www.examiner.com/gadgets-in-san-francisco/motorola-droid-owners-reporting-issues-with-android-2-2-update
http://www.androidcentral.com/evo-4g-update-pulled-over-problems
http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-20019676-85.html
Just a few quick search examples.
Slashdot broke my comment. The first line should have been "a small (below 1 percent) number of WP7 devices have to pull out their battery and restart the phone after an update. Let's compare to the Galaxy S, which had, out of the box:"
Okay, so a small (
-Almost nonfunctional GPS an all devices
-Serious filesystem issues that cause the phone to get substantially slower when time goes by, due to the fact that they were running on an obscure FAT derivative (RFS)
-No OS updates for months. 2.2 has just been coming out in the past few weeks for Galaxy S, while 2.3 and 2.3.3 (two API levels ahead) are out.
Just trying to put things in perspective. Now, back to your regularly scheduled Microsoft bitching...
As opposed to Samsung Android devices, which are perpetually several updates behind?
Are you people fucking retarded? There is NOTHING in common between an HPC cluster and a many-socket commercial database system except that they both have lots of processors. The vast majority of Big Systems are AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, OS/400, or one of the mainframe operating systems (OS 2200, MCP, z/OS, TPF).
The amount of ignorance masquerading as knowledge on Slashdot is truly frightening.
Linux isn't Unix, and for your information, Windows runs on over 50% of servers sold. Linux competes with Windows at the low end, and with Unix at the midrange. Mainframes and monster Unix systems own the high end (16 sockets or more).
Such a framework already exists in Maemo. It's called Hildon, and unlike Android, it runs on Real Linux.
More like 2000. A fast A9 is similar to an entry level Pentium 4 machine. That isn't enough to be on PC-replacement level just yet.
Give it another two generations, and see whether MIPS gets any traction. At least on paper, the 1074k core has equivalent performance and lower power than an A9 at the same speed. I think the next four years will be exciting for processor design.
Also, if I recall, foreign companies can't legally own land in Mainland China - they can just buy multi-decade leases.
Then there's the little problem that below 22nm (or 18, or maybe a little lower), all bets are off as far as whether Moore's Law continues to apply. We may very well be approaching the end of the "make computers faster by putting more transistors on a chip" phase of technological evolution.
Because social engineering is so totally an Uber Advanced Hacking Technique. Anyone who hands out a root password, enables remote root SSH access, and shuts off a firewall because of an email message is dangerously complacent.
WM6 had a huge app library, and the best thing was that you didn't have to get it from any kind of curated "app store." Software could be written in whatever programming language the developer felt like, and frequently went far beyond the "download data from a web API and display it" crap we get on Android/iPhone/WP7. WM6 had its issues, but "no software" was never one of them.
Ah, but the processor is faster than the Atrix*. 1.4GHz Snapdragon has the potential to be quite impressive, especially if they've done substantial microarchitectural improvements since the last-generation Snapdragons.
* The Tegra 2 isn't actually that fast. It's dual-core, but on a mobile phone you almost never have a case when you have two different CPU-bound threads - additionally, the cores themselves are crippled, as they don't have the NEON or VFP extensions. Nvidia's strategy with Tegra seems to be "let's hope everyone is distracted by our GPU that's 10% faster than an SGX, and doesn't notice our shitty cores."
Why wouldn't anyone buy the Pre 3 and TouchPad when there's competition? Why do you think that people are still going to buy Android devices when there's competition from the iPad and iPad 2? Your logic seems disturbingly like Android troll logic.