With 35 years of success under its belt, Intel needs to figure out how to diversify & create new markets.
A Look at Intel’s Past, Present, and Future
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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One would think they’d have this all figured out by now. I just think Intel and HP put all their eggs in one basket and basicly bet the farm on Itanium.
Smart move.
No, really.
Almost had SGI convinced.
I think they’ll be fine after a generation or two of this technology, but it might be too cost prohibitive to generate the revenue and market penetration they were expecting several years ago. Who knows, throw money at it, hype it up, maybe it’ll fly.
I guess you live in your dreamworld. Itanium is a very respectable technology, far more so than x86. It represents a new era in processor-making.
Check this article:
http://old.linuxworld.com.au/news.php3?nid=2043&tid=2
esp. about the “flat earth society”. I think it defines you…
Also check this:
http://news.com.com/2100-1006-1023146.html
Itanium is EPIC successor to the Alpha series. For reasons unknown, everyone agrees that Alpha was an amazing architecture (maybe because it has a cool name?) but processor trolls love to bash Itanium.
If you want to discuss why Itanium is inferior by referencing the specifics of the architecture then go ahead. Otherwise your opinion does not count much compared to Intel’s massive number of skilled engineers and clear superiority of EPIC architecture considered on computer science terms.
>Intel needs to figure out how to diversify & create new markets
You mean that the existing business model of relying on Microsoft to come out with fatter, slower software to rationalize bigger, faster processors every other month is coming to a end?
Be still my palpitating heart…
Nobody was criticising Itanium’s architecture from an academic POV. Yes, I’m sure it is utterly wondrous and superior to everything else on earth, but its market performance is certainly abysmal (700 units sold? Come on) and it is questionable whether the market is interested in a new chip that is not binary compatible with anything that has went before. In this sense, the Itanium is (so far) a failure, regardless of how wonderful you think its architecture is, which is an irrelevant question nobody brought up.
700 units sold? Come on
That is I guess the figure for the first Itanium. Newer Itaniums are adopted on a far larger scale, used on mass produced servers and is no longer experimental. But isn’t the amount of bashing Itanium suffers too much for the first few generations (Considering the fact that it’s based on an entirely new paradigm) ? And it already has amazing performance results (SGI Numa Altix Series).
Please also check this out for pricing issue:
http://news.com.com/2100-1006-1024439.html
the market is interested in a new chip that is not binary compatible with anything that has went before
Binary compatibility? Why would anyone care about this? Do you still run 16 bit applications on Windows? You just recompile your C code (icc is very efficient too), and Voila! Also about compatibility, refer to the remarks in the first link I gave in my previous post (for portability between PA-RISC->Itanium and Alpha->Itanium). On top of all these Intel has been designing the new x86 emulation layer for those people out there for which backwards compatibility is essential during transition period:
http://news.com.com/2100-1006-997936.html?tag=nl
X86 and Itanium have been Intel’s major cash crop for close to 25 years it is true. But Intel’s chip offerings are far more extensive than those two architectural lines. Intel also creates specialized chips for various applications that the vast majority of electronic device users don’t know about even if they may currently be using one.
Intel creates RISC cpus for embedded devices such as the i960 which you will find in low to middle end networking devices as their cpu. Intel manufactures and markets the StrongARM cpus in the US under contract to ARM, Inc. which you will find in a great many handheld PDA-type devices. In fact, ARM cpus dominate the handheld cpu market. These are a couple of examples in a long list of offerings from Intel for various solutions.
Intel is a CPU maker, they make many more products than just one or two plus host chipsets for those. Intel isn’t narrowly focused, they just know how to saturate a market well. Average Joe doesn’t care whether his CPU is x86, PPC, Alpha, Itanium, or whatever as long as he can play his game and not have to stretch his brain to find out that gigahertz isn’t the amount of memory he has.
If anyone needs to diversify it’s product offerings it’d be AMD. They are very narrowly focused on the lowend server and desktop market. AMD has vested interest in keeping the desktop market at the status quo as much as possible: hence the introduction of the hybrid native 32/64 bit processors in the Opteron line. AMD doesn’t trendset, they are caught by a niche market and have yet to break out of the x86 legacy mold. Should the market evaporate AMD would either disappear or have to retool it’s operations very very quickly.
Intel has the ability to set trends to and away from architectures. Despite how it seems in the X86 arena, Intel is not Microsoft’s pawn. Their holdings are diversified enough that there is no way Microsoft can control them. Intel has it’s pick of OSes ready or soon to be ready for it’s Itanium CPUs: HP-UX, GNU/Linux, NetBSD, to name a three. Microsoft is the one running to Intel to support Itanium, not Intel running to Microsoft. Intel has told Microsoft in the past that they don’t need them to make Itanium a success.
>>X86 and Itanium have been Intel’s major cash crop for close to 25 years it is true. <<
oops, nix the “and Itanium”
Should be X86 cpus have been Intel’s major…