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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DRBES who wrote (105755)	11/13/2003 7:23:10 PM
From: Gopher Broke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

The worst case is an ongoing neither success nor failure. It will sap your strength, drain your finances, and worst of all steal years from you when you might be successful elsewhere. I always thought that backing Itanium would bring down the smaller companies like SGI, but I did expect Intel to come to their senses sooner than this. They now need to do some damage limitation, perhaps a major paper launch of an x86 64 bit desktop product or something equally exciting, but they can't do that without cutting Itanium loose.

To: DRBES who wrote (105755)	11/13/2003 11:25:21 PM
From: minnow68	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 275872

With all due respect, I disagree with the outcome on Itanium. IMHO, Itanium is clearly a massive and total failure. The whole point of the design was to transfer complexity from the silicon to the compiler. If you look at actual designs, the total percentage of the die devoted to control is much _higher_ with the Itanium than it is in other classic CPUs (e.g. Alpha, x86, etc.). IOW, the primary design benefit turns out to be a liability! From my perspective, this is a classic idea that sounded great on paper and simply didn't work out when actually implemented. I would think the sane thing to do is admit defeat and move on to a classic architecture. Throwing more billions down a clear rat hole just boggles the mind. So, basically, my opinion is that Itanium is no where near "tantalizingly close to success". It is an abject and total failure that would have utterly destroyed most companies putting this kind of investment into it. However, Intel has so much money that they can afford to blow billions on new ideas. Who knows? Maybe Intel even has enough additional billions to blow to make the Itanic boat float. But I believe the world and Intel would be much better off if Intel just dropped IA-64 and went with AMD's 64 bit instruction set. AMD will certainly do better the longer Intel goes down this crazy path. Mike