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To: pgerassi who wrote (59638)	10/22/2001 5:21:37 PM
From: dale_laroy	Respond to of 275872

>Actually quite a few switched, mostly due to performance price ratios. And many more simply started using Alpha.< The typical Alpha installation win was either a new operation choosing Alpha instead of a mainframe or a mainframe shop installing Alpha for specific tasks instead of upgrading the mainframe. >They replaced mainframes with clusters of minis. It was more reliable and in many instances even mainframes were clustered. You forget that many companies simply bought "Turn Key" systems. The VAR supplied all the hardware, all the software, installed and trained the users to run it. There are many more systems procured the latter way than systems custom built from scratch by the companies themselves. You seem to be of the old paradigm "DIY" rather than the one most commonly used "Buy it off the shelf". The latter method requires a lot of the former to be available. Very little exists for the Itanium. Much exists for x86 and the 64 bit RISC CPUs (BTW Itanium is not a RISC CPU).< This is an honest Achilles heel of the Itanium. I anticipate that Itanium may do quite well in shops that roll their own software, but will probably be a dismal failure in turnkey systems. What??? Don't they sell Xeons now? Better tell Intel that they just lost 50% of their Xeon sales. Get real! IBM will simply push Power and RS/6000 systems, Compaq will sell Alphas (they still have two years left of production and could switch to Hammer just as easily by then) and Xeons, HP can just sell PA-RISC systems (they are still continueing development), Sun will still sell SPARCs and all of those Xeon and Athlon server vendors will still sell x86 systems. The only true strong supporter of Itanium (other than Intel), is Dell. Dell wants to enter the market addressed by Alpha and PA-RISC. Gateway does too, but Gateway is getting so badly burned in the workstation/server market that they may withdraw from it altogether. The fact is that the performance of the processor is a minor consideration with regards to this market. Itanium can be no more powerful than SPARC, yet with a total platform as compelling as SUN's, Dell could become a real player in this market. > You forget that Itanium has evangelists and you are one of them. Me an Itanium evangelist? Hardly! I think Itanium will be as much of a failure as the Motorola 68K. I think that, just as the 68K gathered around it a huge following of OEMs, so too will Itanium, but in the end Itanium will probably be crushed by x86-64, and perhaps the likes of PA-RISC and Power, as easily as the 68K was by x86-32. I can not state however that I have faith in this. I think Itanium will have its day in the SUN, but probably will not last as long after the introduction of x86-64 as the 68K did after the introduction of x86-32. > Sorry to burst your bubble, but somehow you are hoping that having 64 bit extensions will not be used by the owners of such systems.< Hell no! Users will take advantage of 64-bit mode once Hammer starts proliferating in shops. But, most shops that do not need 64-bit mode immediately will not need 64-bit mode for some time. Those that need 64-bit mode immediately will go with Alpha, Power4, PA-RISC, UltraSPARC, or Itanium because there will not be any immediate x86-64 support. The progression will be, 32-bit applications running on an x86-64 OS, followed by 32-bit applications recompiled to x86-64 mode for faster execution, followed by applications specifically written for x86-64 because they need 64-bit mode. This will take time, and during this time Itanium will probably thrive. >A market of a million Hammers will get those things easy. Are you hoping that AMD won't sell a million Hammers? 10 million? That is a far larger user base than 10K Itaniums or even 100K Itaniums.< Best guess is that Hammer will sell over 20M units in its first four full quarters of availablility, but most of these will be in consumer PCs. > BTW hammer could go into systems with more than 8 ways (an 8 way dual core Sledgehammer is 16 way core) by substituting each P2P arrow with a hammer with one HT link each direction pus a link going up or down and placing a plane above with same. Bingo, you have a 32 way (64 core) Hammer. Oops! Burst your bubble thinking that a Hammer with 3 HT links couldn't go more than 8 way, didn't I.< Actually, the hard part will be getting to four-way (eight-way for Sledgehammer). HTT should make hypercube systems easy to design. As to the V series having more market, did you forget that Apple, NCR, AT&T, Unisys as well as many others used it and its later variant, the 88K. The 88K was by Motorola, not NEC. > Also you forgot that SPARC was available then as well. SPARC was a later development. By the time SPARC shipped, the NS32K was basically dead. SPARC was a replacement for Motorola's 68K. If I were going to include SPARC, I might just as well include the Inmos Transputer and Apollo PRISM. BTW, at the functional level, HTT might work as well in massively parallel configurations as the Transputer links.