Itanium in the news (NOT)
Neil Rieck
interest in Intel's Itanium processor to keep supporting it.
The next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will be Itanium free
and while Red Hat is not the only Linux it will be a bit of a morale
blow for Intel.
The Itanium is Intel's 64-bit enterprise chip, which we've long called
the Itanic, and it is not exactly a best seller for Red Hat.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1566977/red-hat-drop-itanic
NSR
Richard B. Gilbert
Maybe the Itanic is sinking? As a number of people argued it would?
JF Mezei
> Maybe the Itanic is sinking? As a number of people argued it would?
In fairness, it has already lasted longer than most people had
anticipated.
That article made an interesting comparison "most people use Unix on
Itanium, few use Linux".
It would have made more sense if they said most people use HP-UX. I know
purists will say that Linux is not a "Unix", but in practice, it is a
unix. Looks like Unix, feels like Unix, smells like Unix, acts like Unix.
Itanium never took off. It is left now as an HP chip
developped/manufactured under contract by Intel. Tukwila will come out
sometime next year, but the pieces have now been set for the 8086 to
take over. Quickpath, multicore, shared caches between cores. It's got
what it takes now to scale up and is first to market.
La Carly was right in that the industry is moving towards commodity
chips, even for enterprise servers. It isn't necessarily the best that
becomes dominant, but in the end, the chip that gets the most
development resources is the one that ends up leading.
Marc Van Dyck
The number of Linux installations on Itanium must be marginal at best.
Who in his right mind would want to run that on a piece of iron that is
at least twice as expensive as a standard intel processor system with
the same power (and not even taking into account the vendor lock-in) ?
As far as I know, Red Hat stopped years ago to maintain the Alpha
distribution, and noone on earth ever complained. Why should Itanium
be any different ? For me this is not much more than a non-event.
People
buy Itanium systems to run OpenVMS or Unix, full stop. And I'm very
surprised to hear that the windows kit for Itanium hasn't met the same
fate yet.
--
Marc Van Dyck
JF Mezei
> buy Itanium systems to run OpenVMS or Unix, full stop. And I'm very
> surprised to hear that the windows kit for Itanium hasn't met the same
> fate yet.
Microsoft has close ties with Intel. So there may have been some
negotations which resulted in Intel adding MS needed features in the
8086 in exchange for MS providing token support for that IA64 thing.
Remember that only a subset of MS software runs on IA64.
Neil Rieck
>
> Itanium never took off. It is left now as an HP chip
> developped/manufactured under contract by Intel. Tukwila will come out
> sometime next year, but the pieces have now been set for the 8086 to
> take over. Quickpath, multicore, shared caches between cores. It's got
> what it takes now to scale up and is first to market.
>
How many times have we heard that Tukwila will come out in the next
year? The second coming of JC may happen before Tukwilia.
Oh and BTW, Merry Christmas to you all.
NSR
Richard B. Gilbert
I think I first encountered that code name almost four years ago!
Anyone who's been holding his breath must be purple in the face by now.
JF Mezei
> I think I first encountered that code name almost four years ago!
> Anyone who's been holding his breath must be purple in the face by now.
Nobody held their breaths for EV7. It was very late, but it was also
understood that HP had no incentive to get EV7 out the door quickly
since, Alpha was already dead, and HP didn't want EV7 to make IA64 look
worse than an all mighty Microvax II.
I don't think there was any time where IA64 had a very positive outlook
for it, nothing compared to the positive and bright future that people
saw in Alpha when it was introduced.
So, why should anyone hold their breath for a new version of a chip that
nobody wants ?
John Wallace
JF, please do try not to call industry standard 64bit architectures
"8086". The architecture which has wiped the floor with Intel's IA64
should more respectfully be called AMD64. AMD invented it (at least
the intersting bits that make it 64bit enterprise-ready), and a very
reluctant Intel were eventually forced to follow, leaving Itanium's
sole selling point (today) the niche market of ultra large memory
single system image SMP systems. Or maybe Itanium is interesting
because of HP-UX or NonStop or VMS. But Itanium itself isn't
interesting to many people, especially not as an x86 follow on of any
kind. AMD64 is that architecture.
Happy New Year!
Arne Vajhøj
The commonly used term is x86-64.
Arne