Re: Intel drops 64-bit Itanium response from Linus

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7966

On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 22:25, cbbrowne(at)cbbrowne(dot)com wrote:
> > After failing to make Itanium competitive, Intel is now downplaying
> > 64-bit CPU's. Of course, they didn't think that until Itanium failed.
> > Here is the slashdot story:
> > http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/23/2050237&mode=nested&tid=118
> >
> > Seems AMD's hammer is going to be the popular 64-bit desktop CPU.
>
> It's really unsurprising; there was /no/ likelihood of Itanium getting
> widely deployed on desktops when there would be an absolute dearth of
> desktop software.
>
> Think back: Alpha was presented in /exactly/ the same role, years ago,
> and the challenges it had vis-a-vis:
>
> a) Need for emulation to run legacy software that can't get recompiled;
> b) Need to deploy varying binaries on the substantially varying
> platforms;
> c) It's real costly to be an early adoptor of new hardware, so the
> hardware is expensive stuff.
>
> Certain sorts of "enterprise" software got deployed on Alpha, but you
> never got the ordinary stuff like MS Office and such, which meant there
> was no point to anyone pushing "desktop" software to Alpha. And we
> thereby had the result that Alpha became server-only.
>
> Why should it be the slightest bit remarkable that IA-64 is revisiting
> the very same marketing challenges?
>
> It has the very same set of technical challenges.
>
> It may well be that by the time it /is/ time to generally deploy IA-64,
> it will have become the Alpha platform. After all, Compaq sold the
> architecture to Intel, and Alpha already has a mature set of hardware
> designs as well as compilers...
> --
> (reverse (concatenate 'string "gro.gultn@" "enworbbc"))
> http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/oses.html
> "Everything should be built top-down, except the first time."
> -- Alan Perlis
>
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--
Dave Cramer <dave(at)fastcrypt(dot)com>
Cramer Consulting