[Info-vax] Itanium in the news (NOT)

[JF Mezei]

Richard B. Gilbert wrote:

> Maybe the Itanic is sinking?  As a number of people argued it would?

In fairness, it has already lasted longer than most people had
anticipated.

That article made an interesting comparison "most people use Unix on
Itanium, few use Linux".

It would have made more sense if they said most people use HP-UX. I know
purists will say that Linux is not a "Unix", but in practice, it is a
unix.  Looks like Unix, feels like Unix, smells like Unix, acts like Unix.


Itanium never took off. It is left now as an HP chip
developped/manufactured under contract by Intel. Tukwila will come out
sometime next year, but the pieces have now been set for the 8086 to
take over. Quickpath, multicore, shared caches between cores. It's got
what it takes now to scale up and is first to market.

La Carly was right in that the industry is moving towards commodity
chips, even for enterprise servers. It isn't necessarily the best that
becomes dominant, but in the end, the chip that gets the most
development resources is the one that ends up leading.