Some interesting news re AMD, Intel, market share.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_38/b3900048_mz011.htm

- Tim

 

The ironic thing is that, prior to the Itanium fiasco, Intel built its
success on always making the new chip completely backward-compatible
with the old one. Thus, the 386 kept the 286-style segmentation scheme,
adding its flat address space as yet another option. And the 286-style
protected-mode segmentation was in turn built on the 8086-style
real-mode segmentation.

The one time it decides to throw all that away and start with a clean
slate (Itanium), AMD sneaks in to take over the old strategy and
out-Intel Intel!

 

17 Sep 2004 10:32:05 +1200, Lawrence D¹Oliveiro <[email protected]
central.gen.new_zealand> says...

The Itanium has some sort of emulation of an x86 that it can run, I
believe.

 

Originally they had onboard hardware support for x86 instructions but it
was pretty slow (think mid range pentium 1). Newer models can emulate x86
in software at an almost respectable speed (about low-mid range P4 I think).

I think the hardware x86 support will be dropped in future models (if not
already).

Cheers
Anton

 

Too slow, and too much of an afterthought.

 

When the x86 architecture was new it was not directly backward compatible
with the existing (and popular) 8080/8085 architecture, though it was
said you could recompile your programs with an x86 compiler. I wonder if
many applications were ported from the 8080/8085 architecture.

 

The itanium does it very badly(slowly).
The itanium 2 is much better, although still a lot slower than what
normal people should/would expect.

 

Are you talking about its sales or its performance?

Seriously though, speaking of sales, you might've already seen this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/18/ibm_plots_idc_mistakes/

Cheers
Anton

 

performance... I figure I shouldn't care about the lack of sales...
Intel dont