Is Itanium the first 64-bit casualty?

Interesting reading here, and very common-sense. Itanium may be the next
casualty in the 64-bit wars, when Itanium was the one that caused the 64-bit
wars to start in the first place.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/...nterwin_1.html

Yousuf Khan

--
Humans: contact me at ykhan at rogers dot com
Spambots: just reply to this email address ;-)

Interesting reading here, and very common-sense.

Pretty much lacking on the factual side, and nothing new in the rest
of it.

Why'd you cross-post so widely?

Followups away from comp.arch.

-- greg

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 07:54:12 GMT, (Greg Lindahl) wrote:

Interesting reading here, and very common-sense.

Pretty much lacking on the factual side, and nothing new in the rest
of it.

Yes, I'm curious why he mentioned none of the known hard facts. I guess
the ones like this
http://www.ptc.com/partners/hardware...ium_letter.htm didn't want
to be held up as examples of the iNfidel.:-) "Decertification" sounds
kinda serious coming from a major workstation software vendor. I wonder
how long before customers umm, decertify 32-bit only x-86 systems.

Why'd you cross-post so widely?

Followups away from comp.arch.

RD&H?

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

(Yousuf Khan) wrote in
om:

Interesting reading here, and very common-sense. Itanium may be the next
casualty in the 64-bit wars, when Itanium was the one that caused the
64-bit wars to start in the first place.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/...nterwin_1.html

Yousuf Khan


Perhaps this is the first case of a processor acting as a catalyst: The
Itanium sparked the 64-bit-for-consumer trend, but isn't actually going to
take part in it ;-)

ws
--
Warren Spencer
Senior Software Engineer
The Associated Press

In article ,
Warren Spencer wrote:

Perhaps this is the first case of a processor acting as a catalyst: The
Itanium sparked the 64-bit-for-consumer trend, but isn't actually going to
take part in it ;-)

Yer whaa?

It was INTENDED to do that - back in 1994, it was intended to replace
x86 in the consumer market by 2001 - but NO WAY did it have a significant
influence on it. The trend was due to the passage of time, involving
Moore's law and Gates's law (bloatware expands at 60% per annum), and
the main chips that started 64-bit use by consumers were the SPARC
and PowerPC. And they didn't have much influence on that market.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

Warren Spencer wrote:
Perhaps this is the first case of a processor acting as a catalyst:
The Itanium sparked the 64-bit-for-consumer trend, but isn't actually
going to take part in it ;-)

Interesting way of looking at it, I'll admit.

Yousuf Khan

Warren Spencer wrote:
(Yousuf Khan) wrote in
om:


Interesting reading here, and very common-sense. Itanium may be the next
casualty in the 64-bit wars, when Itanium was the one that caused the
64-bit wars to start in the first place.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/...nterwin_1.html

Yousuf Khan



Perhaps this is the first case of a processor acting as a catalyst: The

No, quite definitely not the first. Plenty of architectures out there
that died a quiet death and were resurrected in another form for other
markets.

Itanium sparked the 64-bit-for-consumer trend, but isn't actually going to
take part in it ;-)

Much as I hate to say it : I think the Alpha did, NT was first ported
the Alpha/MIPS/PowerPC. IA-64 came much later. In practice I only saw
NT on Alpha actually in production, which is why I didn't say MIPS. :/

Worth noting that DEC did initially point Alpha at Embedded and low
end workstation space, and they continued their spasmodic efforts to
push it at the desktop for a long time.

Alpha appears to have had quite a large "Open Source" user base for a
long time, but that doesn't really count as consumer. However a lot of
that 64bit clean push was accomplished with Alphas, and that lowered
the barrier of entry for vendors of 64bit gear.

Cheers,
Rupert

In Rupert Pigott writes:

Worth noting that DEC did initially point Alpha at Embedded and low
end workstation space, and they continued their spasmodic efforts to
push it at the desktop for a long time.

Care to elaborate on the difference between "low end workstation" and
"desktop"? Since 1994, all low end Alpha workstations have actually been
PCs with an Alpha processor instead of an Intel processor. What can be
more "desktop" than such a system?

Alpha appears to have had quite a large "Open Source" user base for a
long time, but that doesn't really count as consumer. However a lot of
that 64bit clean push was accomplished with Alphas, and that lowered
the barrier of entry for vendors of 64bit gear.

This is true. DEC OSF/1 exposed plenty of open source code that wasn't
64-bit clean. Plenty of proprietary code, too, which severely restricted
the number of commercial applications available for that platform, during
the first years.

Dan
--
Dan Pop
DESY Zeuthen, RZ group
Email:

(Dan Pop) writes:
This is true. DEC OSF/1 exposed plenty of open source code that wasn't
64-bit clean.

From the "flogging a dead horse" department: More precisely, code that
was not I32LP64 clean. I am pretty sure my code and lots of other
code was ILP64 clean, and lots of the I32LP64-clean code would not
work on an ILP64 system (IIRC the Cray T3E was such a system), and
probably lots of the ILP64-clean and I32LP64-clean code will need
changes to work on an IL32LLP64 system (Win64, right?). So you should
not use "64-bit-clean" for programs that are just I32LP64-clean.

Plenty of proprietary code, too, which severely restricted
the number of commercial applications available for that platform, during
the first years.

There were tricks around that (-taso etc.). Netscape was 32-bit code
until it was cleaned up in Mozilla. Or was it? Fedora Core 1 for
AMD64 still contains a 32-bit Mozilla.:-(

Followups to comp.arch.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html

Dan Pop wrote:
In Rupert Pigott writes:


Worth noting that DEC did initially point Alpha at Embedded and low
end workstation space, and they continued their spasmodic efforts to
push it at the desktop for a long time.


Care to elaborate on the difference between "low end workstation" and
"desktop"? Since 1994, all low end Alpha workstations have actually been

Marketing and the perceptions of PHBs with the chequebooks.

PCs with an Alpha processor instead of an Intel processor. What can be
more "desktop" than such a system?

Not my call. Reminds me a little of the thread about some Intel dude
calling SPARC "proprietry".

I think we should play the Marketoids at their own game : Let's start
referring to IA-64 as "Legacy" now that we have a dual-sourced 64bit
architecture in the x86 world.


Cheers,
Rupert