Message #136089 from maui_dude at May 25, 2001 6:28 PM
"The good news is that Itanium has taken so much PR beating last few years that there is a lot of room for upside surprise.
....
This may be overly optimistic, but overall Intel is beginning to look very attractive as an investment with P4, Itanium, .13u, 300mm (and potential growth in communication sector) all coming together at about the same time (as soon as slow economy and inventory is taken care of)."
Transitions to major new architectures or operating systems take a while. With Windows, for example, it took several years for the transition from the execrable Windows 1.0 to the still-execrable Windows 2.0 to the pretty good Windows 3.0/3.1. (I guess the total time was about 5-6 years, as 1.0 came out in 1985, as I recollect.)
The first Itanium is effectively a "public beta," like the Macintosh OS X "public beta" which we (some of us) have been experiencing for the past 6 months (or longer, for developer releases).
Personally, I think the "developer release-public beta-limited public release-full transition" model is a good one. With the OS X public beta, the appearance of the actual code caused publishers to realize "Oh, shit, the system is actually _shipping_! Customers are asking where our OS X version is!"
So the Itanium, early version, is a chance to test out the software, make the transition.
An architectural transition is always tough. Many companies fail. Intel, itself, failed with the 432 and had to fall back to continuing the x86 line as their main offering.
The mullti-year transition from x86 to the IA64 instruction set is probably the best approach.
--Tim May |
