Dear Tench:
You mean you do not keep on the news at such sites as JC's, Anand's, Ace's, Amdzone, Tom's, Sharky's, EE Times, Register, etc.? You frequently quote them or claim to refer to them. For example search JC's for Itanium news for September 2000 (pick 200009 (09/2000) for month and this is what you get:
jc-news.com
You can see the top news item. If you do it at the other sites you can see that Itanium is unwanted and the IA-64 compilers are not up to snuff (performance of the code is bad or you would see Intel post SPEC benchmarks (not being released yet did not stop the Coppermine)). Further, you must have read about the Fall IDF and the vendor displaying Itaniums there. The reports all seem to have them state that they can not get Itaniums to reliably run at the release speeds and reading between the lines show that they do not feel that it will ever be releasable and they were just going through the motions hoping for a miracle. It was at one of these reports that I read that the compiler was still not producing good code (read fast and using a high percentage of the resources of Itanium (they probably compare compiler output to hand coded assembly)).
If you can not read the news sites for this info, you have stuck your head in the sand. That is where I get a lot of information. Some is received from outside channels and others are deduced. When deducing, I try to show the basis for the deductions. I assume at least average intelligence of the readers of these threads and thus figure they will know when I am doing speculation, deduction, passing on news from other web sites, and / or passing information from the other channels. Unfortunately others deliberately misinterpret my posts to personally attack me. I will give them the benefit of the doubt for the first few times, but with some, I have come to the conclusion that they shoot the messenger rather than admit that the information delivered has the ghost of a chance of being true. Even when it is practically inescapably true, they just personally attack harder. I hope you are not one of them.
Pete |
