Great 64 bit Processor Article

[Ramuman]

Originally posted by Un4given


First of all, the article was dicussing x86-64 vs. IA-64 architecture. It wasn't meant as an Itanium vs. Hammer article, since these two CPUs aren't even competing for the same market. His references also heavily pointed to Windows based support, therefore lower end, including desktop applications.

As far as those switching platforms not caring about changing software too, that is totally untrue. These aren't $200 out of the box applications. These programs may cost thousands of dollars for the base install with additional charges for user licenses. There are also a great number of these companies using custom made software, for which they have spent vast sums of money, and are not going to just let go by the wayside because Intel isn't looking to provide decent support for backwards compatibility of x86 code.

I definitly agree with the cost of software not being cheap. A single CPU or user liscence of Oracle can run a grand easily. My point however was that noone is going to be upgrading from a legacy system like x86 (or any CISC system) to a RISC high end server without wanting new software. The same would hold true if a company out grew ANY low or mid range server and needed a true RISC mid to high end server. Also, the cost of software IS in these markets often overshadowed by the hardware and other factors like overall uptime and performance. Do you know how much a top tier USIII server or Power based server can run? Easily into the low millions for a single server with hardware alone and in the case of some very high end mainframes like the z/900, 10-15 million for hardware alone. At this point there are several important factors at play, and cost of software is a limited issue.

I do also agree that custom software could be expensive to port, but if said custom software was developed for the x86, then you would most likely have to replace it when moving to a RISC server. The fact that Intel put ANY x86 support in IA-64 itself could be considered a tab surprising. In fact NO top tier server CPU I know of supports the ISA that the company first established into the mainstream. For example, Power4 can't run 68xxx programs or 3xx series programs from 15 years ago. This isn't an issue to most if any buyer of a Power4 system.

Also, I did read the article, and the fact that he even considered Itanium (or IA-64) as a whole as a low end or Windows x86 CPU shows he at best as dissillusioned in what hes talking about. A single Itanium cartridge costs more then many PCs. Its not a cheap economical low end processor, but in the servers where it would be used, this again isn't an issue when the server might costs 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars.