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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Monica Detwiler who wrote (95911)	2/29/2000 9:38:00 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572505

Monica, Much of the software industry has committed to the Intel 64 bit Itanium - and most hardware developers have also. Has AMD announced similar support for their 64 bit effort - or are they going it alone at this point? All Athlon needs is a compiler. I don't know the numbers, but my guess is that MSFT Visual C++ probably has 80% or more of the market. To make a compiler for Sledgehammer, all they need to do is to enhance their current 32bit compiler with additional instructions, and maybe some optimization. THe whole effort is a fraction of what is needed for Merced. As far as industry support, when Sledgehammer is released in 2001, MSFT may just be finishing their 64bit conversion of Windows 2000 - based on their speed of delivery of 32 bit Windows 2000. Merced may still be sitting there at 733 MHz with no software going nowhere. Assuming that at the launch of Sledgehammer, the 64 bit version of Windows is finished, and a Microsoft added support Sledgehamer istruction support to their compiler, you have all support that's needed. If Linux is still around in 2001, with a 64bit, I don't have any reason to doubt that there will be Sledgehammer support. Joe

To: Monica Detwiler who wrote (95911)	3/1/2000 3:43:00 PM
From: Rob Young	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1572505

Monica, <Much of the software industry has committed to the Intel 64 bit Itanium> Don't get too excited about the committment to Itanium... it is little more than public posturing. The only segment for Itanium to hope for at FRS (October 2000) is high-end floating point. It certainly won't compete for transactions as it will be greatly outpaced by Athlon and Willamette based systems. "Oh my my" you say? Look at Compaq's stated direction: theregister.co.uk "He said Compaq will bring Itanium to market in a four way system first, and targeted specifically at specialised markets. Compaq will use an eight way system based on Foster (Willamette) and then will migrate that model to the future Intel McKinley model. Interesting. Compaq reckons there is so much growth in the eight way market, as its sales figures have proved, that it makes more sense to migrate the eight way model to McKinley, kind of leaving Itanium for the Itaniates." Itanium is a development platform... it won't have much interest at all as its clock-rate sucks and will suck compared to Willamette and Athlon... clock rate isn't everything but both Free-Willy and Athloss will have outstanding memory systems, etc. Itanium is much too late to market and very underpowered (733 MHz FRS) to even think about. Just for grins ... anyone care to guess which OS is the most popular by volume shipment for Itanium this time next year? Rob