Itanium Introduction - The Itanic Rises
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Does all this mean that Itanium is shedding its original moniker of “the Itanic”? It’s on its way. Achieving price equality with Xeon would be a huge step, as well as Intel's plans to create a chipset that can operate with either Xeon or Itanium. That advance would allow Xeon's economy of scale to be put towards lowering the cost of entry into Itanium land.
The real problem all along has been that so few corporations (who are the only ones who can afford to add Itanium based workstations and servers) are willing to also recompile and redesign their software to operate effectively on this new platform. Intel has become a victim of their own success with x86, which basically handcuffs them when trying to get people to shift over to a much more advanced architecture. Unfortunately, in most cases the first question isn't "how much faster will this get the work we need done,” but "will this run the old software we've had since 1987?" This is one reason why Opteron might be successful if Sun, who has signed on to make Opteron servers and workstations, or another company finds a way to extend them beyond the current 8 way maximum implementation. Unlike Itanium, Opteron doesn't have to "emulate" old x86 code, it does it naturally, warts and all. Still, Opteron suffers from a lack of mainstream (ie Windows) 64 bit operating system support. Thanks to its long gestation period, the IA-64 has full Windows and Linux/Unix operating system support.
In our next article on Itanium, we'll get into the use of parallelism, predication, and other tactics Intel uses to allow for IA-64 to be a large departure architecturally from IA-32 that you all are familiar with. We'll also look into the recent addition of dual cores to the chip, and what challenges and advantages this has. Tune in next week, same Dev-Time, same Dev-Channel.
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