[Info-vax] Intel previews new Itanium "Poulson" processor

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:

> Here is some additional material from RW:
> 
> http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT111710021604


3.1 billion transistors. Woopty Do. But what will it do for me ?

Intel bragged about the number of transistors for Tukwilla, but it
wasn't able to brag about its performance.  Talking about concepts for
Poulson is cool, but at the end of the day, what counts is what year
will poulson based machines be delivered to customers, and at that year,
what performance will the 8086, Power and Sparc have relative to Poulson.

The image I have of IA64 is that it is a research project with HP as a
guinnee pig.

Intel is trying concepts and analysing how code can execute. The
advantage of EPIC is that it is easier to collect statistics from the
compiler on how much parralelism is possible and tweak the compiler to
see if it can be improved or not.  The triucks learned from this can
benefit the real 8096 architecture and its compilers.

Since HP is essentially funding this research because it made itself a
prisoner of IA64, Intel can use this  project for pure research that
will benefit the 8086.

Apotheker should be starting soon to talk about his future vision for
HP. When he got the job, he said he would wait a few months to settle
into his new job before making policy statements. It's been a few months.

Apple moved from PPC in part because laptop-capable PPC chips were
consistently late to market.  IA64 has been consistently late to market
and this puts HP at a disadvantage.