Intel plans demo of Opteron rival: 'CT'

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Intel, welcome to the real world

it is very unfortunate that Intel, who has the resources to carry out R/D on future (and better :)) microprocessors chose to take the itanium path for their 64-bit offering. ia64 implementations didn't prove to be very easy and the world could't keep their breath any longer.

So Intel got a clue and took the bold initiative to .... follow AMD! We are going to see all kinds of strange creatures streaming down the production line: pentium 4-64, xeon-64, x86-64, all based on their latest 64 bit IA32 (!!!!!!!!!!)

You see Intel had NO experience with 64 bit architectures and their cantankerous x86 systems were hated by everyone ( in the systems area ). The move to IA64 back in 1997 was a strategic decision in order for them to make a clean break from the beast they created and let grow to unwieldy complexities. They did get good help from HP who had experience with 64 bit datapaths. Alas, IA64 is still very hard to make perform better.... and the RISC chips, which were supposed to have already died out, are experiencing new vigor and good performance results, mainly with the Power G5 from IBM and even with the latest Ultra-III (which managed to go beyond the 1GHz psychological HZ limit).

So what is Intel now to do? The best they have to offer is an overdesigned 1.5GHz Itanium which seriously LACKS in program development tools and runtimes to take advantage of its unique architecture and programming styles.

So, Intel decided to make a full-speed move backwards and is trying to resurect their 32 bit processors into the 64 bit world.... If the Itanium had issues, wait to see all the surprises and misery that these pentium 4s will cause to everybody until they become a viable workhorse for high end servers.

In my oppinion this is a trategic mistake: Itanium has some good design points and Intel should go all the way to make it a platform for high end server / workstation computing. Diverting resources to start feeding again the beast which brought them in their awkward position, will inflict pain to Intel, to its partners and developers and users alike.

Unfortunately Intel has panicked and reverted back to usual schemes for making money: higher clock rates (more pipeline stages/overhead) and a 64-bitification of an unwieldy beast.


Too bad Intel. You woke up to do the right thing late but no you are regressing to old familiar tricks. This is a familiar behavior pattern: MS couldn't make any real progress with its 'latest' technology crap and now is reverting to re-supporting older systems.

In the meantime, other smaller companies are still sticking to their guns and they are bringing about progress technologically and financially (eg, AMD and even SUN).

Power G5 is the real future and I hope that other RISC companies wont give up and finish the race with better systems.

-m

Posted by: michael-t   Posted on: 01/30/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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