[Info-vax] Poulson info from Dave Cantor

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 17-11-2010 14:19, JF Mezei wrote:
> John Reagan wrote:
>> http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT111710021604
>
> Under Compaq, Digital continued to make Alpha presentations extoling its
> bright future and stating that the IA64 was a bloated architecture going
> nowhere right up until June 25 2001.
>
> The fact that some scientist at Intel will make some presentation on
> plans for Poulson does not indicarte to me any type of commitment to the
> architecture.

True.

> Poulson, like Tukwila, is likely to be delayed (especiually if they redo
> much of it) and it arrives late to the market, it will be an also-ran
> compared to more actively developped architectures like the 8086.
>
> It makes no bsuiness sense for HP/Intel to continue to spend money on an
> architecture which gives neither of them any strategic advantage over
> what can be achieved with the 64 bit 8086.

Just speculation.

> Just checked the "top 500 supercomputers" november rankings.
> http://www.top500.org/list/2010/11/100
>
> While the news media speak of China's rise in that list (it is now #1),
> I have not spotted a single IA64 Itanium entry in the top 500. I may
> have made a mistake, not there was none that was quite visible.  HP has
> a number of systems, but they are all based on the 8086.
>
> Opteron and Xeon seem to be the most widely used.
>
> So, they abandonned low end workstations in 2004 saying they would focus
> on HPC. But now, it appears they don't figure in the who's who list of
> HPC systems. What market is left for IA64 ?

Those that have the skills to choose "Processor Family" in the
combo box sees:

392 x86-64 by Intel
57 x86-64 by AMD
40 Power
5 Itanium
2 SPARC
4 various

Arne