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

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (96165)	3/1/2000 8:24:00 PM
From: Scumbria	Respond to of 1572452

Eric, I love fishing What are you fishing for? My first post said that I thought IA-64 would do well, and that I didn't have much confidence in AMD 64. The fish was caught before you cast! Scumbria

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (96165)	3/1/2000 9:45:00 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572452

Eric, That 64-bit version of the OS ships when? Shouldn't you be the one to be worried? According to Paul, there are thousands of samples of Itanium with no 64-bit OS. I have never done systems programming, but my assumption is that the 64 bit OS has 2 parts: Converting the source code to take advantage of the 64 bit addressing capability, and maybe a rare case of 64 bit integer / word. The second part is to compile it for the target processor and test it. Windows NT / 2000 has always been designed to be platform independent. There were versions for MIPS, Alpha, and at some point there was a development of PowerPc version. So the amount of source code that is tied to the peculiarities of the processor it is running on is (or should be) small. There is going to be a huge overlap in the scope of 64 bit Sledgehammer / Itanium projects. Having completed the Itanium project means that all the shared work has been completed, and what remains only the Sledgehammer specific part. That's a lot smaller project, and most likely more manageable and predictable. But what happens if Microsoft is 6 months late? Itanium will be sitting there with no place to go. Or consider the alternative. What if it looks now that Microsoft will be 6 months late, but Microsoft wants to ship at the time Itanium ships? Then you have to start cutting scope. Whatever part you cut will be replaced with existing 32bit equivalent. The result? Mostly IA-32 code that is going to stink on Itanium. Intel may be forced to start to "license" Itanium. Part of the license will be that you are prohibited from publishing the benchmarks, the same way as Oracle does it. Joe