Re: Give away the Itanium Hardware..... To gain acceptance for IA-64 and sell McKinley..... Brilliant.
It's going to be quite a battle next year. Intel's design philosophy has been to focus on raw theoretical throughput, either streaming RDRAM or parallel execution in IA-64, and to ignore any issues of hardware or software compatibility.
AMD's design philosophy has been low latency and execution flexibility, and to extend wherever possible the existing base to stay as compliant as possible with existing hardware and software.
Round one is over, and we see Intel scrambling to switch its platform to AMD's DDR memory standard.
Round two starts next year. Intel will have a "real" IA-64 chip out, followed 6 to 9 months later by the first Hammers (same timeline as Intel RDRAM and AMD DDR chipsets). The hammers, with their integrated memory controllers will allow for very inexpensive systems to be built. Their low latency on-board memory controller will yield high performance, and they will run standard 32 bit code at high speed. They'll also be able to run that handful of database and raster image processing software for which 64 bit code offers any benefit - concurrently with the installed base.
By about a year and a half from now, 64 bit Hammer systems that run the entire installed base of software faster than anything else available will be selling in the millions per quarter with a BOM cost to OEMs for CPU, motherboard, chipset, memory, PS, HD, DVD, etc. no greater than that of an Athlon XP today.
Where will the IA-64 systems be at that time in terms of software base and cost? |
