Intel Itanium

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 04:25:22PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> Yep, you're onto something, for sure.
> 
> AMD got a lot of uptake on AMD64 from the Linux community, because
> they were able to offer some mighty nice server configurations that
> were deeply better than Intel's best 32 bit offerings, and yet not
> terribly much more expensive.
> 
> Linux was a big win, there, because, what with the porting efforts to
> make Linux play well on Alpha, PPC, SPARC, and MIPS, it was
> comparatively quick and easy to add an extra 64 bit platform.
> 
> Java wasn't yet super-popular, so limited support from Sun wasn't a
> big barrier.
> 
> A lot of web server applications could run perfectly well, benefiting
> from the big memory space and comparatively large register set,
> without needing any visible code changes.
> After all, LAMP (Linux, Apache, Middleware, Postgres) apps have their
> code written in ("one of the languages starting with a P") which don't
> care what kind of CPU you're on.
> 
> The same wouldn't be remotely true for Windows(tm), where applications
> are pretty aware of what CPU architecture they're on.  It's no insult
> to Microsoft to say that it's a tougher challenge to port their OS to
> a 64 bit architecture.

They had to break some standard conventions too to do it because they
didn't want to go back and fix all the mistakes they had already made,
so long isn't the same size as a pointer on windows, while it is on linux,
solaris, and many other OSs.  Too many windows programs assumed int
= long, including all over the OS.

Also windows is little endian only and to ever make it big endian would
probably kill Microsoft.

> In any case, the ready availability of "Linux on AMD64" made the
> bootstrap process *way* easier for AMD - they had a profitable market
> (e.g. - servers have way better margins than desktops) almost
> immediately.

They had linux ported to the amd64 simulator before they even had chips
prototyped.

> It's disappointing that there haven't been more instances of such.  I
> would have loved to see cheap-ish boxes running MIPS, ARM, PPC, or
> SPARC.

I belive it will happen for ARM soon.  For the others, not sure.
Lots of MIPS boxes out there as routers running linux that are cheap,
but not if you are looking for a PC, although the chineese are doing
stuff that very well could turn into cheap MIPS PCs.

> Mind you, none of those included the "emulate IA-32" layer that was
> the *other* half of what saved AMD64 from irrelevance - it ran quite
> nicely as a "wicked fast IA-32" box, too.

The chineese MIPS in the new ones somewhat do.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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