Re: Here come the high end Itanium demonstrations
All this sturm und drang over Itanic, when, in a little over a year, it will have been buried by Hammer or Hammer and Yamhill.
These low volume chip architectures are a dead end. Look at Alpha, look at PA-RISC. If they are the only hardware that can run unique software, like Sparc running Solaris or PowerPC running AIX, they can make some economic sense.
But why pay $100,000 for a 4-way windows or linux box running a squirrely, low volume, chip when you can get the same thing for $10,000 using standard chips. And the box running standard chips has 1,000 times as many software applications available for it, and your developers can develop and debug on their desktops. You can even bring in contract programmers in a pinch, without having to pay $50,000 per seat for them to have something to write software on.
Itanic was a bad idea even when it looked like Intel would be competing only with its own standard chips (which could be crippled). With AMD showing 8-way, 64-bit servers that run Windows and Linux, Intel can either kill Itanic with Yamhill, or watch AMD kill it with Hammer.
But, either way, Itanic is doomed. |
