old Itanium articles

Interesting old articles from the dawn of the Itanium age. I found it
interesting reviewing it now that we're probably nearing its twilight.

These two came from the time of the first Merced release in 2001:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-529889.html
http://www.g4techtv.com/techtvvault/...tGen_Chip.html

They were predicting that Itanium would be competing against RISC processors
in both servers and workstations. Not to mention predictions of Itanium
becoming a consumer product by 2004. They were even predicting that Itanium
would be able to eventually make Star Trek-style holograms. But there were
some naysayers, an Intel manager David House who had long since left
predicted that this would be one of the world's worst investments.

This is an old Intel press release from 1997:
http://tinyurl.com/5c9rn

This press release was announcing plans to release Merced by 1999. But of
course it didn't come out till 2001.

Yousuf Khan

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

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Interesting old articles from the dawn of the Itanium age. I found it
interesting reviewing it now that we're probably nearing its twilight.

Yousuf,

Do you ever take a break from trolling IPF? Seriously.

--
Regards, Grumble

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Interesting old articles from the dawn of the Itanium age. I found it
interesting reviewing it now that we're probably nearing its twilight.

These two came from the time of the first Merced release in 2001:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-529889.html

quote

At a preliminary technical exchange, says WideWord architect Rajiv
Gupta, "I looked Albert Yu in the eyes and showed him we could run
circles around PowerPC [an IBM processor], that we could kill PowerPC,
that we could kill the x86. Albert, he's like a big Buddha. He just
smiles and nods."

/quote

No matter how accurate your prediction about the twilight of Itanium, I
hope we get a chance to understand the details behind statements like that.

IBM, HP, Intel, and Elbrus (among others) all thought they could do
amazing things will instruction-level parallelism via a long instruction
word--so amazing that they thought (at least in the case of HP, Intel,
and Elbrus) that they could blow the comptetition away.

It hasn't turned out that way, and it would be enlightening to be able
to see what evidence they were looking at that ended up misleading them.
For Intel, that has to be more than an idle exercise. For the rest of
us, there is probably insight to be gained.

http://www.g4techtv.com/techtvvault/...tGen_Chip.html

They were predicting that Itanium would be competing against RISC processors
in both servers and workstations.

The issue of the moment, on the other hand, just isn't all that
interesting (to me, at least). IBM has misjudged the market for Itanium
in numerous ways? At some point, that has to stop being news.

RM

Yousuf Khan wrote:

This press release was announcing plans to release Merced by 1999.
But of course it didn't come out till 2001.

Interesting. We got our first production systems with Itanium 733MHz and
800MHz Q1/Q2 2000, and the preproduction systems already 1999 (Itanium
667MHz)...

Benjamin

Robert Myers wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:

Interesting old articles from the dawn of the Itanium age. I found it
interesting reviewing it now that we're probably nearing its
twilight. These two came from the time of the first Merced release in
2001:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-529889.html

quote

At a preliminary technical exchange, says WideWord architect Rajiv
Gupta, "I looked Albert Yu in the eyes and showed him we could run
circles around PowerPC [an IBM processor], that we could kill PowerPC,
that we could kill the x86. Albert, he's like a big Buddha. He just
smiles and nods."

/quote

No matter how accurate your prediction about the twilight of Itanium,
I hope we get a chance to understand the details behind statements
like that.

Couldn't it just be "trying to make a pitch to management"?

IBM, HP, Intel, and Elbrus (among others) all thought they could do
amazing things will instruction-level parallelism via a long
instruction word--so amazing that they thought (at least in the case
of HP, Intel, and Elbrus) that they could blow the comptetition away.

It's probably still possible to achieve incredible performance, but maybe
that's not the type of performance that's so important for customers?

I just don't see Itanium as being done in by its performance. I think it's
simply that Itanium didn't address any computational needs. People had
existing code that they wanted to run, and Itanium would've made them
rewrite their code, just to run.

http://www.g4techtv.com/techtvvault/...tGen_Chip.html

They were predicting that Itanium would be competing against RISC
processors in both servers and workstations.

The issue of the moment, on the other hand, just isn't all that
interesting (to me, at least). IBM has misjudged the market for
Itanium in numerous ways? At some point, that has to stop being news.

Well, no, that's not the point. They were clearly hoping that Itanium would
be big on workstations just as much as servers, because on workstations they
were one step away from being PCs too.

Yousuf Khan

In comp.sys.intel Yousuf Khan wrote:

I just don't see Itanium as being done in by its performance. I think it's
simply that Itanium didn't address any computational needs. People had
existing code that they wanted to run, and Itanium would've made them
rewrite their code, just to run.

I wrote some code that mostly ran on x86 boxes.

I had some memory issues, and was given an Itanium box to play
with. I moved my code onto the Itanium box, recompiled and ran.

Everything worked as before. I couldn't tell that I was running on
an Itanium box, except that I knew I was.



--
davewang202(at)yahoo(dot)com

David Wang wrote:
I wrote some code that mostly ran on x86 boxes.

I had some memory issues, and was given an Itanium box to play
with. I moved my code onto the Itanium box, recompiled and ran.

Everything worked as before. I couldn't tell that I was running on
an Itanium box, except that I knew I was.

What if you didn't have the source code?

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Robert Myers wrote:

Yousuf Khan wrote:


Interesting old articles from the dawn of the Itanium age. I found it
interesting reviewing it now that we're probably nearing its
twilight. These two came from the time of the first Merced release in
2001:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-529889.html

quote

At a preliminary technical exchange, says WideWord architect Rajiv
Gupta, "I looked Albert Yu in the eyes and showed him we could run
circles around PowerPC [an IBM processor], that we could kill PowerPC,
that we could kill the x86. Albert, he's like a big Buddha. He just
smiles and nods."

/quote

No matter how accurate your prediction about the twilight of Itanium,
I hope we get a chance to understand the details behind statements
like that.


Couldn't it just be "trying to make a pitch to management"?


I don't think so. Legend has it that Grove went to Russia and came back
convinced that, if Intel didn't do it, Elbrus would. I think I've got
those details right.


IBM, HP, Intel, and Elbrus (among others) all thought they could do
amazing things will instruction-level parallelism via a long
instruction word--so amazing that they thought (at least in the case
of HP, Intel, and Elbrus) that they could blow the comptetition away.


It's probably still possible to achieve incredible performance, but maybe
that's not the type of performance that's so important for customers?

I just don't see Itanium as being done in by its performance. I think it's
simply that Itanium didn't address any computational needs. People had
existing code that they wanted to run, and Itanium would've made them
rewrite their code, just to run.


Your post created an image of bulldozers pushing mountains of c into the
ocean with wheeling seagulls picking away at the rotting garbage. I
like it. You have some idea why I don't share everyone else's apparent
enthusiasm for granting x86 immortality?

In any case, I don't think anyone ever expected that much code would be
rewritten. Recompiled and retuned, yes. Rewritten, no.


http://www.g4techtv.com/techtvvault/...tGen_Chip.html

They were predicting that Itanium would be competing against RISC
processors in both servers and workstations.

The issue of the moment, on the other hand, just isn't all that
interesting (to me, at least). IBM has misjudged the market for
Itanium in numerous ways? At some point, that has to stop being news.

Well, no, that's not the point. They were clearly hoping that Itanium would
be big on workstations just as much as servers, because on workstations they
were one step away from being PCs too.


Yeah, if I worked, I think I could find articles not just mentioning
workstations as a target market in passing, but going on elaborately
about them (market that was dominated by RISC, market of typically early
adopters, stuff I can't remember, I'm sure). But so what?

It's like the sunk costs which, as Keith pointed out, don't figure into
ROI calculations. Obsessing over who Intel _thought_ they were going to
sell the chip to just doesn't accomplish that much. Who do they think
they're going to sell it to now? That's what matters.

RM

In comp.sys.intel Yousuf Khan wrote:
David Wang wrote:
I wrote some code that mostly ran on x86 boxes.

I had some memory issues, and was given an Itanium box to play
with. I moved my code onto the Itanium box, recompiled and ran.

Everything worked as before. I couldn't tell that I was running on
an Itanium box, except that I knew I was.

What if you didn't have the source code?

Then you couldn't "re-write" the application, which you
claimed was needed for x86 to Itanium migration.

The fact of the matter was that I didn't even have to
change the makefile. I ran the exact same code on
Mandrake + x86 as I did on Redhat + Itanium.



--
davewang202(at)yahoo(dot)com

Robert Myers wrote:
Couldn't it just be "trying to make a pitch to management"?


I don't think so. Legend has it that Grove went to Russia and came
back convinced that, if Intel didn't do it, Elbrus would. I think
I've got those details right.

Was Elbrus that much of a benchmark to Intel?

I just don't see Itanium as being done in by its performance. I
think it's simply that Itanium didn't address any computational
needs. People had existing code that they wanted to run, and Itanium
would've made them rewrite their code, just to run.


Your post created an image of bulldozers pushing mountains of c into
the ocean with wheeling seagulls picking away at the rotting garbage.
I like it. You have some idea why I don't share everyone else's
apparent enthusiasm for granting x86 immortality?

Well, that wasn't the image I was trying to convey, but now that you've told
me that's the image you had, now I can't get it out of my head. :-)

As for x86's immortality, it stays important by evolving to fill modern
needs. Eventually, you might find that x86 has evolved so much that it's
become hidden behind a completely different architecture. AMD64 seems to be
one small step towards hiding away x86. I personally thought that 32-bits
was all that could be had from x86, I couldn't imagine too much that anyone
could add to it to extend it out to 64-bit, but I was wrong, AMD64 actually
does a little bit of creative subtracting to extend x86 -- I never imagined
that was one of the available options.

Actually, when I first heard of IA64, and how it was going to maintain
compatibility with x86, I thought it was a winner for-sure. But of course, I
was also pretty puzzled by how Intel was going to extend x86 out, since as I
said I couldn't imagine it, but I knew that Intel must have some plan --
it's their own design afterall. Then eventually I heard IA64 was a
completely different architecture between 32- to 64-bit mode. I thought well
this still makes some sense, and I still thought it was a winner; at this
point, I was thinking that it would be some kind of RISC architecture which
has enough in common with x86 encodings to work both ways. It was only after
I started finding out that IA64 was so alien from x86 that it actually could
only emulate x86, was when I first started changing my mind about it.
Without full-speed x86, it was going to be a loser.

In any case, I don't think anyone ever expected that much code would
be rewritten. Recompiled and retuned, yes. Rewritten, no.

Actually, I was using the term "rewritten" rather loosely, to also include
simple recompiles. Afterall, you may still have to add a line to your
compiler makefile. So that still sort of counts as a rewrite, anything that
minorly inconviences the programmer. :-)

Well, no, that's not the point. They were clearly hoping that
Itanium would be big on workstations just as much as servers,
because on workstations they were one step away from being PCs too.


Yeah, if I worked, I think I could find articles not just mentioning
workstations as a target market in passing, but going on elaborately
about them (market that was dominated by RISC, market of typically
early adopters, stuff I can't remember, I'm sure). But so what?

Yeah, well I brought that point in because of Intel's assertion that
workstations were never really a big part of Itanium's picture after that HP
workstation product announcement.

It's like the sunk costs which, as Keith pointed out, don't figure
into ROI calculations. Obsessing over who Intel _thought_ they were
going to sell the chip to just doesn't accomplish that much. Who do
they think they're going to sell it to now? That's what matters.

You can still force the VMS and NonStop people to migrate. There was an
announcement yesterday that MIPS has been EOL'ed on the NonStop
architecture, to be replaced by Itanium. Unix people can migrate pretty much
anywhere they want.

Yousuf Khan