Re: Intel drops 64-bit Itanium

> After failing to make Itanium competitive, Intel is now downplaying
> 64-bit CPU's. Of course, they didn't think that until Itanium failed.
> Here is the slashdot story:
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/23/2050237&mode=nested&tid=118
>
> Seems AMD's hammer is going to be the popular 64-bit desktop CPU.

It's really unsurprising; there was /no/ likelihood of Itanium getting
widely deployed on desktops when there would be an absolute dearth of
desktop software.

Think back: Alpha was presented in /exactly/ the same role, years ago,
and the challenges it had vis-a-vis:

a) Need for emulation to run legacy software that can't get recompiled;
b) Need to deploy varying binaries on the substantially varying
platforms;
c) It's real costly to be an early adoptor of new hardware, so the
hardware is expensive stuff.

Certain sorts of "enterprise" software got deployed on Alpha, but you
never got the ordinary stuff like MS Office and such, which meant there
was no point to anyone pushing "desktop" software to Alpha. And we
thereby had the result that Alpha became server-only.

Why should it be the slightest bit remarkable that IA-64 is revisiting
the very same marketing challenges?

It has the very same set of technical challenges.

It may well be that by the time it /is/ time to generally deploy IA-64,
it will have become the Alpha platform. After all, Compaq sold the
architecture to Intel, and Alpha already has a mature set of hardware
designs as well as compilers...
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"Everything should be built top-down, except the first time."
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