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To: pgerassi who wrote (59599)	10/22/2001 10:09:09 AM
From: dale_laroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

>Alpha penetrated markets. Most of these were DEC shops running either VMS or Ultrix. Most of these sites switched to Alpha with little fanfare.< Most certainly. Alpha was designed to replace the VAX, which was a Supermini, not a Mainframe. But, how many sites switched from IBM Mainframes to Alpha? >DEC's main advantage to IBM or any others mainframe systems was the ability to cluster. Alpha did this in spades. So your interpretation is quite flawed.< This is only significant in that it enabled Alpha to continue what VAX started. For years there had been a paradigm shift occuring that gradually replaced mainframes with clustered minis. This did not kill off mainframes, but it did relegate mainframes to more and more specialized roles. >And you forget that performance and compatability is a big draw. And price is a huge draw. Having all three could switch away all the OEMs from Itanium. There is no current market where Itanium Dominates. Some time in the future plans do not make much of a difference. OEMs are fickle. If Itanium doesn't outrun current systems, the OEMs could simply say that they will restart or continue their current RISC systems.< So, Dell, Gateway, and SGI are simply going to continue with their current RISC systems if Itanium doesn't pan out? >HP has a new PA-RISC in the works, IBM a Power4 CPU, Sun has theirs and even Intel could go back to Xeon. And every day it looks like IA-64 is falling behind more and more.< SUN is irrelevant because they are not going to adopt Itanium anyway. Well, I suppose that SUN could be relevant if Hammer is compelling enough versus Xeon that SUN decides to give the x86(-64) market another run. While it is possible that HP will stay with PA-RISC and IBM will abandon Itanium altogether for their own Power architecture, this still does not address the needs/desires of the likes of Dell, Gateway, and SGI. >Just like many other "can't lose" propositions. Remember Microchannel?< Who besides IBM thought that Microchannel was a can't lose proposition? >How about Futurebus? Rambus?< Only evangelists of these architectures believed that they were can't lose. >Or how about the big x86 RISC replacement i860?< Sorry, but when I worked at YARC I was one of the ones who recommended against going with this architecture. And, judging from the total lack of i860 support from mainstream vendors, I was not alone. If you were wanting to try to convince me that you had a point, you should have used the i432 as your example. >There are many examples of something that supported by the biggest name in an area and although it looks like a "can't miss sure thing", it falls flat on its face because of irrational arrogance.< But far fewer that have the top ten vendors in the industry behind them. Granted, SUN isn't behind Itanium, but SUN dropped out mainly due to political reasons. >Take an example. A large company needs to replace its MRP/ERP system because the of the new goals of management. They do a search for MRP/ERP software that does all of the things they need. They find an ideal package with some extras that make it highly desirable. The systems it currently runs on are HP PA-RISC (5 yrs exp), IBM Power (3 yrs exp), Sun (4 years), Compaq (DEC) Alpha (6 yrs exp) and x86 SCO Unix (5 yrs exp). They are willing to write an Itanium version, but it will take an extra year and you would be the first. You know the drill, they will take the one with the highest experience, performance and lowest cost in that order. That gives them either Compaq, HP or a x86 OEM. Itanium would not be on the list (not ready yet and this company doesn't want to be a pioneer).< Chances are that, if Xeon would be adequate for their needs, such a company will go with Hammer, if Hammer lives up to its promises. But, with the exception of the eight-way market that Intel is intentionally taking away from Xeon, Hammer will only be able to penetrate those market for which Xeon would be adequate. > This result is why you cannot call IA-64 established. Itanium is not established, it is entrenched. The difference can be illustrated by the military analogy of Bataan. MacArthur was never established in Bataan, but he was most certainly entrenched. > And of the tens of thousands of applications out there (we are taking VARs, system integrators and software houses here) and even Intel with all of its resources could not afford to have the code ported to IA-64 (it would run into the 10's of billions easy and that is with a good optimizing stable compiler (and that is still not available) and reliable development environment).< Major VARs actually prefer less common systems, such as Alpha and PA-RISC, not because they can do the job better or cheaper than more common x86 based systems, but because it is harder for their customers to switch to an alternative solution. >The closest historical parallel would be the 8080 to Z80 switch or the 286 to 386 switch. They did not require a recompile to run old systems faster. And they had a new mode that made them faster and gave them additional abilities that were very desired (the 286 to 386 switch vastly simplified the needed code models and made it easy to use much larger amounts of memory (no one I know would ever want to switch back to the 286 model and MMU)).< Personally, I am hoping that the Itanium versus Hammer turns out to be the equivalent of NS32K versus 386, but I wouldn't count on it. NS32K had the 68K, Fairchild Clipper, MIPS, WE32K, and even NEC V series all as strong competition. If all that was needed was compatibility with the installed base, the 32-bit variant of the NEC V series would have far exceeded the 68K in market share.