[geeks] Re: HP's squandering

[Dave McGuire]

On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 02:29 PM, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
>>   Some big vendors are *making* Itanium machines.  Nobody is buying
>> them, or has bought them.  There is a huge installed base of HP3000
>> machines.
>
> The University of Amsterdam bought an Itanium "cluster" (is it really a
> cluster if it only has two nodes? Anyway, both nodes are quad proc).
> OSC has an itanium cluster of 72 dual proc nodes.  The NCSA (they are
> the super computer center in Chicago, right?)

   NCSA is located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.

>  has a 160 node (dual proc
> nodes) cluster.  University of Manchester has a Itanium cluster, but
> they are unspecific about how many nodes.  A university in JP claims
> that Itaniums are 3x faster than 933mhz P3s, which we already know are
> better at many types of FP than P4s.  Business users are somewhat more
> difficult to find.

   Wow, THREE whole installations!

   Do you personally know of anyone, anywhere, who has bought, is 
planning to buy, or has used, or has even seen an Itanium-based PC?

   I know one person...James Sharp...who played with one briefly on a 
test-drive program maybe two years ago.

> Perhaps that will change.  I'm kinda hopefull at the moment since I
> think that this is a big improvement over the x86 line, and I like the
> idea of such explicit paralelization on a single processor.

   Well, I have to agree.  To clarify, I personally have nothing against 
the Itanium, I think it's an interesting architecture.  My anti-Itanium 
comments are based on the fact that the Itanium has failed in the 
marketplace, and it's likely that its replacement, Itanium2, will also 
fail for the same reason.

   I also don't like the way Intel has spent the past ten years 
poo-pooing other companies' modern processor architectures as 
"proprietary processors" (and if x86 isn't exactly that, I don't know 
what is!) that are incompatible with x86 family...then they come up 
with EXACTLY THAT...and expect the whole world to embrace it, expect it 
to become wildly popular just because it's from Intel.  Nice attitude.

   That said, I'd like to get my hands on an Itanium box to play with a 
little bit.  But they're so rare that the only way to buy one is brand 
new, which I'm certainly not going to do...I'm willing to shell out 
maybe $350 for one.

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire           "She's a cheek pincher.  I have scars."
St. Petersburg, FL                          -Gary Nichols