"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."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Well, thats what Itanium oppologists (this isn't directed at you) keep saying; there is a time to just admit to customers or potential customers that the idea seemed great on paper, by in reality, it never delivered due to the complex nature of it.
I think, personally, what really killed it was the stopping of Solaris for Itanium coupled with Microsofts decision to have a very niche concerntrated Itanium version of Windows that wouldn't have all the same bells and whistles that would appear in the the x86-64 version.
Personally, if I were Intel, I would have gone with an ISA that had a chance - the archiecture you can change, modify, and turn up side down if you want, but once you've chosen you're ISA, you're stuck with it.
SPARC would have been a good one - don't take SUN as a benchmark for what can be accomplished; a Intel architecture, SPARC ISA (along with VIS) bolted onto the top, coupled with Intels raw economies of scale, it could have turned out to be quite a nice product - throw that on an EFI motherboard, and bobs your uncle, you'd have a processor with an openstandards ISA, 64bit from the ground up, a well known ISA with good compilers available for it, a large ecosystem in the way of software vendors, it would have been a massive win-win situation.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
an OS hasn't been written to take full advantage of itaniums full feature set.
What features would that be? I don't think the OS can do much for the Itanium; it's the compiler that has to do all the hard work of exploiting instruction level parallelism. The OS is more critical on architectures that rely on thread-level parallelism, e.g. Sun's Niagara.
Member since:
2005-07-06
They are quickly reaching the limits of the given architecture. Hence the reason IBM is starting to push CELL. itanium is new an fresh and has some room to flex not to mention from my understanding an OS hasn't been written to take full advantage of itaniums full feature set. HP-UX V2 is basically a port same with Redhat not fully optimized. x86 is long in the tooth and 64 bit x86 albeit somewhat new won't last.
Alpha was great technology that was owned by a bunch of dumbasses(Digital) that couldn't market it properly. itanium is in a lot better position.