The future of IA-64

[icarus4586]

There was a very interesting article about Itanic on Ars Technica from January 1999. Read the whole article, but a quote in the conclusion struck me as ironic. The author states, "I predict that shelling out for an IA-64 chip to use on the desktop will be overkill until at least 2003, and maybe even beyond that." That obviously didn't happen. But will it ever happen? What is the Itanic's future?

 

[jhu]

i thought that had been the original intention too: to eventually bring itanium down to the desktop someday. thanks to amd, that may never happen.

 

[Steve]

Intel probably wouldn't put Itanium down below the market it's in, since in a way that would be admitting that the Opteron is a legit competitor and not a class below. That's why you don't seen bench comparisons of the two.


On the other hand, I recall reading a while back that Intel was going to merge Itanium into the Xeon line somehow, can't quite remember exactly....

 

[jhu]

Originally posted by: sm8000
Intel probably wouldn't put Itanium down below the market it's in, since in a way that would be admitting that the Opteron is a legit competitor and not a class below. That's why you don't seen bench comparisons of the two.


On the other hand, I recall reading a while back that Intel was going to merge Itanium into the Xeon line somehow, can't quite remember exactly....

there are spec benchmarks comparing various processors. opteron is better than itanium in integer, and itanium is better in floating point. apparently intel has stated that itanium and xeon will share the same socket eventually. i wonder how that's going to work?

 

[Steve]

Originally posted by: jhu
there are spec benchmarks comparing various processors. opteron is better than itanium in integer, and itanium is better in floating point.

--Didin't know about those. Thanks, I'll take a look--

apparently intel has stated that itanium and xeon will share the same socket eventually. i wonder how that's going to work?

--That's what I was thinking of. The info is out there somewhere--

 

[klah]

Nice graph of Intels plans here: http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/204/6

Percent of Intel systems (ia-32/ia-64):

1Q-00: 100/0
4Q-02: 95/5
1Q-04: 60/40
4Q-04: 10/90
4Q-05: 0/100

 

[Vee]

Originally posted by: jhu
there are spec benchmarks comparing various processors. opteron is better than itanium in integer, and itanium is better in floating point.

Yes. And I sometimes wonder what will happen to Intel, if AMD K9 pops up and turns out triple the vector and FP performance of K8.... (I don't know that it will, of course...)

 

[klah]

Originally posted by: jhu
i thought that had been the original intention too: to eventually bring itanium down to the desktop someday. thanks to amd, that may never happen.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/o...ay/20040923180613.html

09/23/2004

HP spokeswoman Nita Miller:

?HP is discontinuing its Itanium-based workstations. In working with and listening to our high-performance workstation partners and customers, we have become aware that the focus in this arena is being driven toward 64-bit extension technology?

 

[Steve]

Yep, just saw that on Slashdot.

 

[jhu]

i think intel and hp should just ditch itanium and go back to using alpha and pa-risc.

 

[Steve]

Would be nice, but....End of the Line for Alpha - August 18, 2004