"Many people in the industry assumed that Itanium had a low - and poor - profile among end users. That was what the folks at IDC assumed until recently, when they surveyed 500 members of their Enterprise Server Customer Panel. The results were somewhat surprising, they said. Not only was there a high level of awareness among the users - more than 80 percent knew of the platform - but that their intent to buy an Itanium system was fairly strong. About 24 percent of those polled said they had bought at least one Itanium system, though only 13 percent of non-HP users had done so. However, more than a third of all participants said they were highly likely to buy an Itanium system within the next 12 to 18 months."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
I'd say x86 is the agonizing platform, sooner or later this 30 y.o. architecture will hit the scalability and performance wall.
The x86's demise has been predicted for at least 20 years, so you're gonna have to come up with some more convincing evidence for your assertion.
The x86 ISA has been extended and adapted so often and successfully that the scalability argument is just silly. And if x86 is so bad, why does nobody, including Intel themselves, manage to beat it (and not just for special applications) at the same transistor budget?
x86 may not be pretty, but it certainly does the job. And with its compact code it's actually quite well suited to today's requirements, where memory bandwidth
and latency are much more important than the size of the instruction decoder.
Besides, what exactly is an "agonizing platform"?
Member since:2005-08-29
The x86's demise has been predicted for at least 20 years, so you're gonna have to come up with some more convincing evidence for your assertion.
And so was predicted the end of litographic technology, which still resists, but it doesn't proofs that it will not reach its practical/physical limitations at some point. It WILL.
Technology/engineer will always find it's way around, but it doesn't mean it's the best way. Transition costs and compatability are really the key terms in this issue, so industry always tend to postpone such gigantic transitions. (LCD vs CRT etc)
The x86 ISA has been extended and adapted so often and successfully that the scalability argument is just silly.
You think so? Just look at the figures showing real performance gain for past decade. You'll be surprised how curve subsides due to different factors. x86 just hapens to be one of them.
And if x86 is so bad, why does nobody, including Intel themselves, manage to beat it (and not just for special applications) at the same transistor budget?
And who would beat that mamoth application base with its software developers? Like I said, compatability is really a key issue here.
x86 may not be pretty, but it certainly does the job. And with its compact code it's actually quite well suited to today's requirements, where memory bandwidth
and latency are much more important than the size of the instruction decoder.
Now, you are not having any clue about what you're talking, do you? Bandwidth is always opposed to latency, and instruction decoder is just a way to save bandwidth on part of latency. Further more, it limits CPUs ability to process data by delaying and limiting number of instructions which are fed to its pipelines. Out-of-order execution just makes things worse when it comes to prediction miss (pipeline flush). It's not that simple, you know.
Edited 2006-02-20 14:36
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline.""It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2005-07-06
What does surprise me that Intel just won't give up on the agonizing platform.
I'd say x86 is the agonizing platform, sooner or later this 30 y.o. architecture will hit the scalability and performance wall.
Plus if you want more power you can just get more CPUs and it really doesn't cost you that much more
You can't infinitely add more processors, otherwise we would be running clusters of 486s.