Intel's friends pass on Itanium chipset

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Now the Intel woke up and smelled the coffee: it is a little LATE, 10 YEARS to be specific.

Intel + HP announced back in 1995 that their IA64 would wipe out the entire RISC community after EVERYBODY would switch to their micro-processor. Intel was a ... little late to materialize its magnificent dreams, SEVEN years to be accurate, when the Itanium-2 became available. Until then the performance was mediocre at best. Nevertheless, although Intel was positioning Itanimu-2 for the high-end market, NEVER presented a coherent plan to make it a processor for a LARGE SMP, and it wasn't until late last year that Intel presented its first chip set for up to 64 It-2 processors... In the meantime EVERYBODY would had
to improvise with up to .... four processors. And so they did: SGI (now up to 512 processors!) and HP (up to 64).

Now performance is decent but because their ground-breaking EPIC (VLIW really) has not made any significant inroads to the high-end market, and AFTER the successful implementations of 64-bit x86 processors by AMD, Intel changed its mind and started palying catch-up with AMD....

Now at last they realized that a high-end processor without a total system architecture that it fits in, is like having a powerful engine but no frame or transmission to go with it.

TEN years later Intel unfortunately lost the IA64 train. Vendors have moved to alternatives. Let alone that Power5 is close to 2.0GHz and already multi-core and SMT.

It is amazing how fortunes change so unexpectedly....good luck Intel cathing up with AMD.

-m; Posted by: michael_t Posted on: 07/18/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use