Processor Direction (was PowerHouse in the next 3 years?)

[Darren Reely]

Blue,

Apparently IBM is producing Itanium boxes just as they do Pentium boxes, 
but they are also continuing development on their Power processor lines 
for both servers and lower end machines. They show no intentions of 
giving up on their own high performance processor.  Like the new AMD 
chip, IBMs 970 runs both 32bit and 64bit applications natively. The 
reason I know this much, is because I've been following rumors that 
Apple will soon use this chip. And the SPARC camp isn't sleeping either.

I hope your dead wrong regarding "Other processor technologies will fall 
by the wayside". If that occurs we will begin to see a slowdown to 
delivered performance increases. In large part, it is the competition 
that has been pushing us forward at such a fast rate. I think we'll 
continue to see healthy competition because people do like to have 
choices. Likely the selection is shrink.

Darren


Edis, Robert wrote:

>I agree, the Itanium IS an issue.  With HP-UX, True64, OpenVMS and MS
>Windows NT being ported to this processor it is definitely the way servers
>will go.  Other processor technologies will fall by the wayside due to
>economics over the next few years.  Alpha has/is being merged into the
>Itanium, the SPARC is getting long-in-the-tooth and I think IBM will use the
>Itanium in preference to developing a new 64bit chip of its own.  The only
>possible contender will be AMD's Sledgehammer which has the advantage of
>running 32bit apps in native mode as well as 64bit apps.  The Itanium runs
>32bit apps in emulation mode I believe and therefore such apps run slower on
>Itanium than on a 32bit CPU.
>
>  
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