Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 5th May 2009 21:06 UTC
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Member since:
2008-11-19
(I do not work in the industry, so experts should correct me if I'm wrong.)
Itanium basically took over the space previously occupied by Alpha: little-endian, RISC-based CPU designed from the ground up for 64-bit mathematical operations and memory addressing. Windows and OpenVMS run on it just like they continue to run on Alpha.
It is a clean architecture which in *theory* can deliver exceptional performance on a variety of workloads, by having the compiler sequence and package up to six instructions per cycle. Unfortunately, the compilers never got good enough to fully exploit this instruction parallelization.
Now, Itanium is stuck in the same restricted market as Alpha -- turn-key enterprise serving and scientific number crunching -- while x86-64 takes over the general server market because it supports the legacy x86-32 architecture and makes no special demands of compilers.
Edited 2009-05-06 08:06 UTC