With the next Itanium chip, Intel has abandoned a feature it once banked on but that never proved successful, CNET News.com has learned.
Circuitry to let Itanium run software for x86 chips, such as Pentium and Xeon chips, is not present in the forthcoming "Montecito" processor, according to the 176-page reference manual for the chip published this week (click here for PDF).
"IA-32 EL provides much better performance and flexibility for 32-bit applications on Itanium," spokeswoman Erica Fields said of the choice. "With Montecito, we took back the silicon area that was being used up by the x86 hardware support."
The change, which Intel had refused to discuss until now, reflects the company's diminished Itanium ambitions, which cast the chip as being only for higher-end servers. Intel's retreat to that market segment was in part because Itanium couldn't run x86 software effectively, which imposed major transition burdens on software companies and server customers.
Itanium's delays and poor initial performance meant that the x86 support wasn't useful when it arrived. The chip also lacked support for newer x86 features. "Basically, no one ever used hardware-based IA-32 execution,
so better to use the silicon for something else," said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. "Of course, basically no one uses software-based
emulation either, but at least that doesn't cost chip real estate."
Support for IA-32 EL is necessary for operating systems on Montecito, according to the manual. "All OSes running on Montecito have a
requirement to have IA-32 EL installed," the manual said.
Microsoft Windows and major Linux versions include IA-32 EL. The emulation layer is considerably slower than a modern Xeon however: A 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processor runs emulated x86 instructions at about the same speed as a 1.5GHz Xeon processor, according to Intel.
When Intel and Hewlett-Packard announced the collaboration to build what
became the Itanium processor family in 1994, they promised the chips
would be able to run software written for the two lines they were intended
to replace, Intel's x86 chip and HP's PA-RISC.
"The planned architecture will maintain binary compatibility with both
companies' software bases," the companies said in the 1994 press
release. Support for PA-RISC software came through an emulation
technology called Aries, but Intel had hoped for faster x86 support by
including direct hardware support on Itanium chips.
Reworking software for Itanium isn't an onerous problem, especially for
major software companies, but there's more to porting software than the
initial technical work, Haff said. "The issue is providing service and
support for a unique binary, not the port," he said.
Itanium once had the support of all the top server makers. But Sun
Microsystems--never a major Intel ally--canceled
its Itanium version of Solaris in 2000, and IBM and Dell dropped their Itanium server products in
2005.
HP, which dominated the Itanium server market with 79 percent of all
shipments in the third quarter of 2005, is working with Intel and others to improve Itanium's software availability.
Whats the point in using Itaniums 32-bit emulation.. It never worked anyway and theres no point in using there 64 bit intstructions. Intel doesn't think so since, I believe, they are licensing AMD's 64 bit intstructions for there Pentium 4 line of chips. AMD has shown you can have 32 and 64 bit without any preformance hits. Maybe Intanium was designed ahead of its time and could not compete with newer technology
if i remember correctly: according to the lawsuit from yesteryear, between AMD and Intel, Intel isn't required to pay licensing on any AMD patents, though AMD is required to do so on Intel's. Seems bogus, but I believe that is still the case.
Web giant is spending $120 million to beef up its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, according to filings with the city reviewed by the San Jose Mercury News.
The Samsung Galaxy Mini 2 S6500 could make its debut at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month, according to a leaked promotional image.
MIT creates a simulation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Spacewar. A relic of the early days of minicomputers, it was one of the first computer video games and set the stage for many others, including Asteroids.
[nm]
drole = )