http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7966
On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 22:25, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > 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... > -- > (reverse (concatenate 'string "gro.gultn@" "enworbbc")) > http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/oses.html > "Everything should be built top-down, except the first time." > -- Alan Perlis > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate > subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your > message can get through to the mailing list cleanly -- Dave Cramer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cramer Consulting ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]