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Red Hat Software Businesses

Alpha Release Of Red Hat's Itanium Distro 112

Posted by timothy from the cart-horse-chicken-egg dept.
nicktook writes: "ZDNet has this story that RedHat has released a full alpha distribution for the 64-bit Itanium processor. Can Itanium hardware even be bought yet?" Not by jes folks, that's for sure. cnoe also sent a link to the official announcement from Red Hat as well. Coupled with SGI's release of Pro64 compilers for Itanium, it seems like Intel's Next Big Chip keeps whispering "penguins." Stunning news from MS on this front is long overdue.
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Red Hat Alpha Release For Itanium

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  • And??? (Score:5)

    by Issue9mm ( 97360 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @08:17PM (#1064699)
    Okay, not to seem like the naysayer here, as I'm all for this. Props out to RedHat for making this come together as quickly as they have. It's not often a free OS can beat MS outta the gate on hardware support.

    On the other hand, I'm seeing a lot of posts saying that this is going to 'make' Linux. I'm sorry kids. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, nothing is going to 'make' Linux all by itself. Awareness is the only thing that will 'make' Linux.

    How many people were hit by the I.Love.you virus? Probably close to the same number of people that have learned to accept such 'inconveniences' in day to day life. Sure, we wouldn't put up with it, but we don't have to. We know other things. Anyway, I'm getting offtopic...

    What I'm trying to say, is that the average, every-day, Joe Blow Consumer doesn't care about proc optimizations and compatability. If they hear that Microsoft doesn't have one running Itanium yet, they'll wait to buy Itanium chips. When MS is ready, so will they be. The chances they'll run across an Itanium with RHat on it at their local Circuit City, or CompUSA, or Best Buy is slim to none. And even if they do, they're not going to bite. They'll wait for MS to push them towards Itanium. And then they'll go out and plunk out the cost of yet another OS upgrade, and won't pay it a second notice.

    This is our sad reality... Accept it. No single feature, optimization, or compatibility will 'make' Linux. We're not going to sweep Microsoft under the rug with this. We may gain a few users, and that's fine with me. Every little bit counts. Once people become aware that there is an operating system out there that doesn't crash every day, or run slower as they day progresses, they won't want to go back. At that point it will become worth the effort to learn a new OS.

    Take it how you want.

  • A lot of stuff now days needs numbers greater than the 4 gig you can fit in 32 bits. e.g. most disks are bigger than 4 gig and memories are starting to go there too. Remember small and large memory models under DOS? You don't want to go there. As far as disks and databases that use them it's slower, and extremely painful programming-wise to use 32 bit calculations to manage more than 4 gig of a resource.

  • Re:And??? (Score:3)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @09:30PM (#1064701)
    > nothing is going to 'make' Linux all by itself

    No, no single thing. But the little PR victories add up. Sites as pedestrian as abcnews.com are now carrying the story about Linux running on the S/390. Hardly a concern for Joe Consumer. Still, people are going to read it and say, "Yeah, I've been hearing about that 'Linux' thing." And the stories keep adding up.

    If you are in to the whole World Conquest thing, then you have to acknowledge that PR matters.

    --
  • First it states it is an Alpha release and later an IA-64 release; which one is it?

  • Just wondering, the story says that Itania (?) can't be bought by Jes Folks. Who is this Jes Folks guy/gal, and why are Intel discriminating against him/her?
  • Very good point, and I agree. The OS model is the best thing going for Linux & Free Software right now. You mention Microsoft's mind-boggling amounts of resources to throw... I would argue that we have just as many resources in the community.

    We are simply less organized, and less motivated, because it's what most of us do in our SPARE time, instead of full time. That is not a detriment though. I submit that because most of our work is done in our off hours, we take more pride in it. Which is why our code doesn't have 63,000+ bugs.

    Linux, on the other hand, gets ported quickly, and almost by habit to new platforms.

    Again, 100% correct. Portability is a huge factor. MS doesn't have to worry about portability as much, because whatever they port it to is going to be their own OS, which (one should assume) has backword/forward compatability built in. The portability of OS however, means that when one company makes a great leap, as RHAT did in this case, then we all jump right along with it. What works for RHAT works for me. I may have to mod the code a little, but then it's re-released for whatever I ported it to.

    I'm not arguing with anything you said, because I agree almost whole-heartedly. I still just think that it's 'awareness' that is our 'one big thing'. That lack thereof is all that's hurting us. A lot of people don't want to learn new things, but some don't mind. Some of them are in positions of power.

    Example: Bill the Bossman is a manager at a data entry facility. Bill notices Linux at his brother's house. Bill's brother runs uptime, and shows Bill that his Linux machine has been used heavily, but not rebooted for the past 14 days.

    Bill thinks, "Wow... This could certainly change things at MegaCorp... no more rebooting and losing work in the middle of the day. That I LOVE YOU virus cost me three weeks worth of hours!" Bill heads back to MegaCorp and checks with his IT dept. The IT dept thinks switching is a great idea. 250 machines are switched over, and employees trained.

    Because most of their work is data entry, only StarOffice is focussed on, and people are now running Linux. These same people, while still clueless as to what's going on, notice that they're not crashing. They no longer see the BSOD. Their work is safer, and they are more productive. They then check into Linux, etc...

    In another comment, SweenyTod notes that people want to use the same applications between work and home, and he's also right. So if they're using Linux at work...

    Anyway, sorry for the length of this post. It wasn't necessary, but it's a slow night here, and I'm bored as hell. Thanks for listening...

  • > I just wonder how sucessfull ia64 is going to be. ... It will proberbly be huge, just to spite me, but let me just say that I wont be a early adopter!!

    I doubt that there will be much consumer rush for it. Even if the Win2K port runs well on it, Win2K holds a very tiny share of the world's desktops right now. Nor is the Itanium likely to be cheap. I'm sure Intel will push it for servers, but even there it will be interesting to see how its price:performance ratio stacks up against the latest generation of x86 systems.

    I suspect 32-bit x86 will reign the desktop for quite a few more years, except among scientists and engineers. And as you say, it will be interesting to see how IA-64 competes among those CPU-power-users. (At least with Linux they can pick an architecture based on its price:performance ratio, rather than being stuck with the one that their store-bought operating system happens to support.)

    > I tried linux on a Digital Alpha and this _cured_ me of most of my desire to try alternative platforms.

    I presume the things that didn't work for you were the various utilities and applications, rather than Linux per se? Do lots of open source apps break even if you recompile them? I'd be interested in hearing a bit more about your experience.

    --
  • Windows isn't even 32 bit ready yet and they've been at it for going on ten years

    do you think 64 bit will be any different
    .oO0Oo.
  • The IA64 is not a breakthrough chips. There exist numerous other 64-bit risc chips already, with comparable performance (ultrasparc, soon new version, alpha, power). Also the IA64 is not fully backwards compatible with IA32 (finally), that is current IA32 binaries may run on it but at strongly reduced speed AFAIK (for those, upgrading to IA64 wouldn't make sense).


    IA64 is a big deal. Intel gets better yields than any other chip company. They will ship massive quantities of IA-64's and price Alpha's and SPARC's out of the market.

    IA-64's can beat out competitors than same way previous Intel/MS combinations sent Apple to 15% market share. Gaggles of vendors (including Compaq) hocking IA-64 based machines will put Sun and Alpha out to pasture. If you look at the history of the computer industry you will see that technological supieriority does not equal market dominance.

  • Dude, I suggest you not use Dos and Windows 3.1 as your points of attack against Microsoft. Try to aim at something a little more current, even NT 3.5 would be a better target.

  • Re:I hate to say it... (Score:3)

    by eMBee ( 27441 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @09:52PM (#1064709) Homepage
    some links:
    linuxdev.net [linuxdev.net] about the ottawa linux symposium mentioning linux on merced
    a comment on the linux kernel list [iu.edu] regarding SCO Unix running on IA-64 as early as 1997
    and of course you should check out the Linux on IA-64 [linuxia64.org] project homepage.

    greetings, eMBee.
    --

  • Re:What's the advantage of 64 bit? (Score:3)

    by locutus074 ( 137331 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @10:54PM (#1064710)
    What can we do with 64 bits we can't do with 32?
    Represent the dollar amount of Bill Gates' wealth, for one thing. :)

    --

  • Stunning news from Micorsoft. (Score:4)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @09:55PM (#1064711)
    > Stunning news from MS on this front is long overdue.

    I dunno. I was stunned by several news stories about Micorsoft over the last couple of weeks. Promiscuous love letters, the Cookie Monster, and now sordid revelations about Clippy's secret life.

    What Micorsoft needs right now is longer gaps between stunning revelations.

    --
  • IA-64 is a LIW chip, not RISC. Unfartunately I don't know if this will allow it to be faster (probably largely dependent upon the instruction types being used in a given app) ie - might be faster for graphics processing but slower or equally fast as an Ultra Sparc for something like networking.
  • I tried linux on a Digital Alpha and this _cured_ me of most of my desire to try alternative platforms. The trouble is that a whole lot of things just dont work on other than the X86 platform.

    I'm curious about this. I've been a long time user of Sparc Linux, and I've found virtually no differences. The obvious ones I have noticed are the sexy console (which x86 can finally now do with the framebuffer support), and the fact that x86 binary-only apps (e.g., Acrobat Reader, Oracle etc.) obviously won't work. I can happily run the SunOS version of Acrobat Reader, though, and I'm not too bothered about other closed source apps. The only problems I've had with open source programs have been those that include x86 assembler with no C alternatives. What problems did you have with non-x86 Linux?

  • 8 bits ought to be enough for everybody.
  • ...that this comment follows an article on Linux for ia64. Moderators, mark this post down and stand up for on topic posts.
    ---
  • You're right. And apart from that package you'll see that if you get the standard platform SDK for Windows (freely downloadable) it includes a whole section dedicated to "getting ready for 64-bit Windows".

    I needed this because I'm kinda forced to produce an application for Windows as an asignment (for my study to become a civil engineer). It didn't really say it that obviously, but I think that they'll go mad if I come up with a linux-app.
    Come to think of it... It would be fun to see what they'd do...


    By the way: at the moment I nearly always boot up to Windows 2000. And if I'm completely honest: it does it's job quite well. I haven't had a crash since I installed it...


    xchg .,@
  • the link in the post (to the RH announcement) is broken.
    Check out the real announcement here: http://www.redhat.com/abo ut/2000/press_itanium-alpha.html [redhat.com]
  • jes folks == just us folks

    It's shortened

    --
    Star Trek vs Star Wars. [furryconflict.com]
  • Having worked with said SDK, the compilers are certainly available, but the current state of Windows on IA64 is a joke. Most of the management tools don't work, just getting the latest beta installed took 4 tries since the installer keeps crashing and the promised 32 bit compatibility is, for us at least, far from good. What's particularly disappointing is that Windows doesn't seem to have advanced much since the last beta we got months ago. They don't even have a self-hosting compiler yet which makes development a severe PITA. I don't know how Linux stacks up against this yet, but what's out there for Windows right now doesn't really qualify as what I would call 'usable.' At least the latest beta lets you make shortcuts (trying to do so on the last one would crash explorer). So I guess it all depends on what you would define as a 'release' (although as I said, I have no idea what the state of the Linux Itanium world is, it's very possibel I wouldn't qualify it as a 'release' either).
  • This is the single best route for linux to get on the Big Iron. While Linux is known to run on Sun E4000s (sun boxen w/ upto 14CPUs), nobody is going to run Linux full time on a machine that cost $200,000+ and the vendor provides the "Official" OS for that hardware.

    Itanium is aimed at the $50k+ server market. Linux is looking like one of the "Official" or "Intel Supported" OSs for this platform. Therefor people will be buying $50K to $500K machines from VALinux and running Linux on them.

    The Itanium port will "make" Linux on the Big Iron machines.

  • Itanium (aka Merced) is years late, and is now slated to launch sometime this year at a rather underwhelming 800MHz, although Intel themselves admit they are currently having problems getting it much faster than 600MHz in the lab. It uses up ungodly amounts of power, and has terrible heat problems.

    While Itanium is supposedly IA-32 compatible, this compatability comes at the cost of performance. Itanium runs 32 bit software (i.e. all currently available software, including Windows itself) *SLOWER* clock for clock than a 32 bit processor. In other words, you'll probably get better performace from an entry level 600MHz Duron than a 600MHz IA-64 !!! A 1GHz Thunderbird (or PIII if you can find one) will simply blow Itanium away on 32 bit performance.

    Itanium is such a poor implementation of the IA-64 architecture that Intel's technology partner HP has done a complete Itanium replacement IA-64 implementation called McKinley, that they have licenced back to Intel. McKinley will be the first IA-64 implementation to offer decent performance and clock speeds (although still suffering from poor 32 bit performance), but is not scheduled to be released by Intel until late 2001.

    Itanium, or even McKinley, are not going to be mainstream desktop parts due to being outperformed by 32 bit chips such PIII and Athlon, and more modern chips such as Intel's upcoming Willamette and AMDs Thunderbird, Mustang and 64/32 bit Sledgehammer. AMD Sledgehammer (slated for late 2001 release) includes dual 32-bit cores and will provide stunning 32 bit speed as well as 64 bit mode - it therefore offers a smooth upgrade path allowing 64 bit applications to run alongside 32 bit ones running at top speed.

    IMO we havn't seen the last of the Itanium/Merced delays. I expect that Itanium will never see a full volume release, but will rather be an extremely low volume stop-gap solution until the better performing McKinley is available sometime next year.
  • How many people have PPro machines? Not many. The world wasn't quite ready for a CPU primarly for 32 bit applications to hit the mainstream. Merced is going to be an even greater leap!

    The only thing that counts is what OSes and software are available when Merced/Itanium and the followup Foster chip are even worth buying.

    --

  • That's odd. I started running Linux on sparc a few years ago and I've never even thought about using a peecee since then. Linux may have good support for 95% of the peecee hardware out there, but what if you have something in the 5% category? I assure you your Alpha experiences were less frustrating than those of people trying to get Linux to be stable on an Abit BP6. And even if your hardware is well supported, it's still all a big pile of 16-bit legacy crap crufted together with obsolete glue and the marketing power of Microsoft.

    Then I got myself a Sparcstation. Think of the light shining down from the heavens and illuminating the heathen's face for the first time. The hardware is beautifully built and high quality. The Linux support for it is excellent. As far as I'm concerned, the primary Linux platform is sparc; i386 is just a secondary little-used port. Linux on sparc is everything an OS should be - stable, fast, powerful, and elegant. And no matter how hard you try, you just can't do something this nice on shoddy, inferior hardware. Go buy yourself a cheap sparcstation 20 and find out what you've been missing. I've never tried Linux on Alpha, but the sparc port is proof that a port can be better than the original.

  • I'm looking foward to the release of intel's itanium chip. Why you ask? Simple. The release of itanium running Linux is going to ensure that 64 bit architechtures in the Linux world gets the attention it deserves. This is going to benefit the AlphaLinux community more than anyone else, including intel. Think about it.

    All the outstanding bugs that are due to 64 bit issues will get more attention and as a result they'll be fixed faster. Also commercial software houses will port more of their stuff to 64 bits seeing that "oh look there's a market now". It's going to get to the point we're 64 bit Linux runs great and is well supported in general...

    Now what hardware are you going to run it on? Seeing that there's really no big benefit of being "binary compatible" in the Linux world since most of the software we use is Open Source anyways. So it comes down to this.

    Alpha hardware which already has a proven track record and great community support and is backed heavily by Compaq ,Samsung, and Alpha Processor Inc. or Intel's brand new 64 bit baby?

    I almost forget to mention the FREE fully optimized C and C++ compilers available from Compaq and their optimized math libraries that boost performance dramaticly.

    Let me ask you another question. Which one do you think the average geek will actually be able to purchase and not feel that they have not just squandered their money?

    The choice is yours.

    Peter
    --
    www.alphalinux.org
    Peter Petrakis Warrior/Engineer ppetrakis@alphalinux.org
    "Oh my God! They killed Xena! You bastards!!"
    " Who the hell are you!? Name's Ash Housewares..."
    --
    www.alphalinux.org

  • Re:What's the advantage of 64 bit? (Score:5)

    by WedgeAntilles ( 122298 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @08:19PM (#1064725)
    It's really not the "64-bit" that makes it better / faster (although it does help a bit with the wider datapath and all). What is really cool about the IA-64 instruction architecture is the extremely sophisticated use of ILP (instruction level parallelism). In ILP terms, the Itanium (and other IA-64 processors) uses a hybrid of various ILP architectures to achieve maximum utilization of all the sub components of the processor. The IA-64 architecture is designed to give information that allows the processor to run certain instructions at the same time or before other instructions have completed, etc. Moreover, the IA-64 architecture is not locked in to one specific processor make-up (as some other advanced architectures are). Thus, you can make an IA-64 chip with say 3 integer units, 2 floating point units, and 4 fetch / store units and it can use the exact same programs and instruction set as an IA-64 chip with 5 integer units, 4 floating point units and 20 fetch / store units (for example). Also, IA-64 is designed to be enormously compatible with IA-32 (modern x86) code so that you don't have to get all new versions of every program.

    In comparitive terms, the Itanium is to the P6 core what the P6 core was to the original Pentium (P5) core. The Pentium brought ILP to the x86 line in a very big way and blew away the 486 with it's Superscalar architecture, and the P6 blows away the Pentium with it's speculative execution and other features, etc. The Itanium will be about as big a change. The disadvantage though is that to fully take advantage of the processor, programs and OS's need to be recompiled, though hopefully this won't be too big of a problem.

  • could you reference this? I'm interested...


    -jerdenn

  • Re:Pre-Alpha Windows on ia64 demonstrated (Score:3)

    by jeffg ( 2966 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @08:22PM (#1064727)

    In fact, as early as August 31, 1999 -- when the ia64 chip was known as Merced instead of Itanium -- Microsoft announced that they had Windows running on engineering prototype systems [microsoft.com]. See also 64-bit Windows Overview [microsoft.com] at Microsoft's site, which notes that there is an existing Software Developers Kit and Device Driver Toolkit, specs for the Win64 API, etc.

    Of course, clicking the link to the SDK and the DDK results in:

    Passed=True

    March 30, 1999

    The page you're looking for has been moved or removed from the site.
  • Let me tell you a torid tale of a consumer market gone bad. There was a company of name Microsoft, who's OS was pretty sad. It was a graphical shell of a crappy cmd line and it hadn't true multiuser support. And at Microsofts head was a man named Bill, who wrote BASIC all from scratch. And the DOJ got put away until Bill released 2k. When Windows 2k was not Ok. The DOJ got pissed. And they sued MSFT for half their cash and Bill got really miffed.
    At the same time there was Linux, an OS that was pretty good. It was posix nice, with apache and Bryce, and was free and open as this. And Linux suits like RHAT sucked because they couldn't turn a profit: Who's going to buy a product they can download free from the 'net? And so the Linux hackers hacked away and made Linux for the I-64. And Bill got pissed and he was miffed and made a dangerous call.
    His friends at Intel picked up and cut him some slack. They conspired to get the DOJ off his back. They slowed the I-64 so Bill could get in, and rewrote the specs so that Linux can't win. And Bill got good and Linus got pissed and the DOJ saved the day. Cause MSFT went down and LNUX went up and RHAT flew away.

    That post was released under the GPL. Feel free to do whatever you want with it.
  • I don't have any references to back me up, but the sketchy reports I have read say that the long delays are because of horrible performance when executing legacy x86 code. Like Pentium II at 10 times the cost type of performance.

    Sorry for the "I read somewhere" post.

    -B
  • You don't steal free software. It was freely given to you to do as you want.

    RedHat and the other distributions aren't charging $50 for the package. You can by the same exact CDs from other places for $2 or less. What you do get for $50 (although I've seen official RedHat for $29 at Fry's), is 30 days support. You are free to resell your RedHat CD by making multiple copies to recuperate your initial buy.

    I disagree with most (some?) /.'ers position on the music case, so I won't argue for it.

  • Re:This is great for the whole computer industry. (Score:3)

    by Baki ( 72515 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @08:31PM (#1064731)
    Breakthrough seems exaggerated.

    The IA64 is not a breakthrough chips. There exist numerous other 64-bit risc chips already, with comparable performance (ultrasparc, soon new version, alpha, power). Also the IA64 is not fully backwards compatible with IA32 (finally), that is current IA32 binaries may run on it but at strongly reduced speed AFAIK (for those, upgrading to IA64 wouldn't make sense).

    So I don't see what the fuzz w.r.t. the IA64 is all about. At the time it will actually hit the market, it is already outdated, and for example Linux will have faster (sparc/alpha) platforms it can run on.
  • Hah! I love linux and Unix as much as the next guy but Microsoft still has a very very very....very big edge. In entrenched usage, market share, awareness, and in development. And, quite frankly, there are still several things that windows does a lot better than linux, and it will be a long time before that changes.
  • Absolutely. And AMD announced several months ago (sorry, I don't have a link) a comparable bit of silicon that WOULD be fully backwards compatible with existing IA32 code. And, as I recall, AMD has plans for a 128 bit chip, real-soon-now (TM). Anybody know of any eval units out yet?

    Intel has managed with the IA64 to pull off another 8008/8080/8085/8086/8088/80186/80188/80286 mutual incompatibility trick. Intel got away with it last time(s) - sort of - 'cuz IBM saved their tail by choosing the 8088 for their PC, but only because Zilog did even worse going from the Z80 to Z8000. Anybody seen any Zilogs in a LONG time?

    Hmm. I just got a Compaq brochure in the mail hyping their Alpha Boxes with Linux. Nothing like solid, proven performance. Attaboy. Now, with a ton of really nice applications ...

    Well, the Intel/Microsoft combo has a lot of FUD going for it in a lot of business managers' minds - and the public's, too. It will be "interesting" to see how it all sorts out.
  • Their binary-compatibility monopoly will crumble-crumble. So proud of binary reusability, and this will be their greatest weakness.

    Everyone will have to develop binaries for all platforms, a split here will cause loss in focus.
    And since all drivers and stuff are always in binary form... well. I'm sure all the big hardware manufacturers will have new drivers out pretty soon, but I don't want to be forced into any group of products, but rather choose what I view as the best.
  • It's not Jes, it's JES. JES - Job Entry Subsystem - which is your flavour - JES2 or JES3? We are the JES folks, keeping your bank account happy since the 1970's.......
  • Look your are going to cane me for this, but I did the install on an unsupported alpha. It works, and has worked for the past year and is working right now, providing me with squid proxy and ip masquarading but...

    It does strange things, things that never happen on intel, it doesn't have the support infrastructure of intel. When you have a problem on a X86 machine you get onto deja.com and you find the answer, alphas are much more rare and it just takes longer to get answers - particularly as I live in Australia and most of the world is asleep when I am trying to do stuff (especially on unsupported variants).

    Please understand that this is one of several alphas that we own, we run VMS and TruUnix and the alphas are _outstanding_ pieces of equipment. It is just more difficult to do linux on alpha than it is to on x86

    My point (if I had one) was that ia64 is not for a casual user. There are significant differences and difficulties once you step outside of the most commonly installed base of equipment. If you install linux on a ia64, you will have a greater degree of difficulty compared to a ia32.

    I _love_ linux cross platform capabilities, I use that ability, now if only all apps were cross-platform as well!

    It amuses me when I write ia32. This name implicitly assumes there was a architectural basis for its design. This is of course entirely false.

  • Would you mind pointing out something that Windows does better? As for stability, efficiency, configurability and development-friendliness I think Unices are natural winners. Would you count wider software support as something an operating system "does better", or what do you mean?

    A million flies can't be wrong... or could they?
  • Even if this is the case -- does it really matter? I mean, who cares if Linux or Win2k was the first OS that booted on the Itanium. What counts is if the OS is fully functional and stable, and if it becomes stable before the Itanium hits the market.
  • That a crock of crap and you know it.

    Moreover, the IA-64 architecture is not locked in to one specific processor make-up (as some other advanced architectures are). Thus, you can make an IA-64 chip with say 3 integer units, 2 floating point units, and 4 fetch / store units and it can use the exact same programs and instruction set as an IA-64 chip with 5 integer units, 4 floating point units and 20 fetch / store units (for example).
    Like, say, an Alpha 21364 can run 21064 code, or a Pentium III can run 8086 code? This has been a feature of processors for years and years, and the only processors that are affected by this sort of problem are VLIW processors. EPIC (Itanium architecture) is VLIW with some hints to try and get around the problems of VLIW. I would prefer a multi-threaded processor myself, or an Alpha, or a 6502.

    Also, IA-64 is designed to be enormously compatible with IA-32 (modern x86) code so that you don't have to get all new versions of every program.
    But very slow, not a very effiecient compatability.

    I saw 2 Itanium boxes at CeBIT. One was running Linux flawlessly. The other was running Windows. I brought up the control panel, and it crashed saying that it could find some DLL in WinNT32.

  • Am I the only one saw this [cnet.com]? its like 2 months old
  • I have browsed across this link [faceintel.com] at www.faceintel.com. It really saddened me that such a respected and rich company such as Intel would give their employees a time in hell. Somehow, after reading the letters written by Intel employees, I see every effort on Intel's side with new eyes.

    Maybe you will say it happens everywhere. I don't know, it doesn't happen in Nokia, that's for sure.

    Now go on and moderate me -1 Offtopic, but tell me whether you can look at Itanium and say how cool it is after reading those letters.

  • I think it's clear that it, or its successors, will see the light of day. Intel really need to have a 64bit processor, so they have to produce something. Of course it could fail, but I don't think they will just give up. And if it does fail they will try something else.
  • Well, actually I don't think it a crime to sell music for money, it's perfectly ok. But I don't like to be forced to buy lots of CDs for lots of money if I want just a little diversity in my listening habits. Just as I don't like to be forced to buy MS Office for $500 or whatever, only because I need to open/edit an occasional .doc or .xls file. That's why privately copying sofware/music doesn't give me a bad conscience at all - after all, I couldn't afford to buy it all anyway. Make MS Office sell for $50 for private use, CDs for $5, no problem. Probably they'd still make enough money, because people would be more inclined to buy at a reasonable price. Cost for copying _IS_ near zero, so charging such horrendous sums from poor people like me is practically useless. :-)

  • Re:What's the advantage of 64 bit? (Score:4)

    by espensk ( 121073 ) on Thursday May 18, 2000 @01:39AM (#1064744)
    Since other people have talked about the advantages of the Itanium in particular, I thought that I should try to actually answer your question: what is the advantages of 64-bit systems?

    Well, for starters, 64-bit systems usually comes with 64-bit data paths (buses). I'm saying usually because one could in theory implement a 8-bit bus that semantically behaved like a 64-bit bus. For instance, Amigas have 32-bit CPUs, but were equipped with a 16-bit bus. Having wider buses helps a great deal for most applications since the memory bandwidth is increased.

    Also, 64-bit systems usually comes with a bus address path that is more than 32 bits. For instance, MIPS is 64-bit and is equipped with a bus that accepts 54 address bits (is this correct?). This enables you to put more than 4GB of memory into the machine and actually access the memory in a clean way from you appliction.

    One of the most intriguing aspects of 64-bit architectures though, is that your virtual memory addess space is 64 bits. This allow you to implement things like single address space operating systems [asu.edu]. You can also have huge files mapped into your address space (imagine having a movie of, say a few hundred gigs, mapped into your application), easing the development of applications tremendously. You could denote a few upper bits of an address to identifying hosts, and implement a large cluster of distributed shared memory. You could denote parts of the address to containing the process id, leaving you with a system where one particular address is unique both over time and among other applications. The list goes on...

    As you can see, 64-bit architectures offer some obvious performance advantages. The biggest advantage though, as I see it, is that it opens up the door for some interseting operating system research/design.

  • The downside of this is that pointers now require 64 bits themselves. For linked lists and other simple datastructures, this can be a lot of space taken up by pointers.
  • Anyone have any benchmarks, to compare this machine against a G4, or even older x86 machines running Linux?

    Also, who is allowed access to these machines?

  • And I seem to recall digging around in some MS sample code last year and my eyes bugged out when I saw #ifdef WIN64.

    Bill's no dummy.

  • The fact that Linux will be the first major OS to be ready for the Itanium is a great breakthrough for the whole computer industry.

    Management types in big companies are going to have a hard time snickering at a free OS when a buggy Windows 2000 for Itanium is released late!

    Someday this event may be remembered as the turning point in the OS war.

  • but news.com has a big story on it right now - apparently HP is releasing an itanium emulator for people to use to test ia-64 code on, code compiled with SGI's OSS ia-64 compiler. :P

    apparently, there are only about 3,000 working ia-64 systems in the universe right now. (barring, of course, extra-terrestrial coincidental development of the ia-64)

    --
    blue, posting with mozilla m15 :P
  • The entire Itanium platform is basically nothing more than a test platform for the next IA-64 chip, McKinley.

    This is because Merced/Itanium is 2.5 years late, and poorly designed. It is struggling to hit a meagre 800MHz (it was designed to debut at 800MHz, but on .25u process and in 1998), and appears to have only 96k L2 cache and 64k L1 cache [aceshardware.com], because rather than reaping the predicted simplifications of moving to a VLIW design, the Itanium core has fallen into a stew of complexity which leaves very little room for large cache size, even at .18u. This project has chewed up and spit out all of Intel's seasoned engineers on their Santa Clara design team, and was basically finished up by a huge committee of inexperienced kids fresh out of college. Every knowledgeble independent hardware analyst I've seen has said that, while IA-64 has some potentially promising ideas behind it, Itanium is going to be an ugly plodding beast of a chip, and its only chance at success is through miraculous marketing. Too bad for Intel's marketing machine that they're trying to move into a new space (high-end servers) with Itanium, and thus the people buying these machines are going to be well-informed and used to buying from vendors other than Intel.

    The good news for IA-64 is that McKinley, the successor to Itanium, is much more on track (it should be out in volume by Q2 or Q3 2001), and appears to be performing quite nicely. Incidentally (or not), McKinley has been designed almost entirely by a much smaller (and more experienced) team over at HP (where EPIC, the philosophy behind IA-64, was designed as well); about all Intel will have to do with it is the fabbing and the Intel Inside logo. Also, McKinley will have the advantage of being fabbed with a brand-new .13u process, which ought to leave it enough room for a real L1 and L2 cache, and allow for presentable clock speeds. Thus, most organizations are looking at Itanium as a sort of public beta for McKinley--they'll buy a couple to get used to the platform, start to develop software for it, and have a core understanding in place in case they decide to upgrade all of their high-end servers to McKinley in a year or so. Almost no one is planning on deploying Itanium as a long term solution, because it will simply not be cost effective for the mediocre performance it will have.

    And thus the "race" to get a good IA-64 OS up and running really isn't all that important. MS will be sure to have W2K-64 "gold" well before McKinley is released, and that's all that really counts. Getting Linux on Itanium solid before W2K-64 goes gold will be nice, but it most certainly isn't going to win Linux a beachhead in the high-end corporate market, simply because most high-end corporate stuff can afford to wait for W2K-64 to be ready before they switch to IA-64.

    On the other hand, a rather peculiar consequence of the IA-64 design is that applications need to be recompiled for each new processor core in order to take advantage of the EPIC features. (This is because, in IA-64, the compiler does most of the instruction scheduling, and not a scheduler in the CPU's logic; thus, the compiler better know how many functional units the CPU has, for example, or else it will schedule things all wrong.) This might seem to give an advantage to OSS, since one can just get a new compiler and recompile all of one's applications if one has the source to them. However, considering the market all of this is directed towards, I'm quite sure no one will have any trouble getting seperate versions of W2K or Oracle or whathaveyou optimized for Itanium or McKinley or any subsequent IA-64 chips.

    For anyone who was expecting IA-64 to show up on the desktop anytime soon: don't. The first IA-64 chip scheduled to have a shot at the high-end consumer market is Deerfield, planned for 2004, but expected to come out later if at all. It would take a little bit to explain why, but EPIC is very much better suited to single-tasking machines running streamlined, well-tuned code--things like databases. It's just a poor fit for consumer applications. And anyways, if you want a neat Intel chip to get excited about, Willamette--the next desktop chip--looks way sexier than Itanium, and has a lot of cool design features (eg. double-pumped ALU, trace cache) which are just as innovative as IA-64's VLIW stuff.

    Just to close things off, here's a couple links for those looking to learn more about Itanium and IA-64. (Even if the design doesn't pan out, some of the principles behind it are very interesting.)

    Hannibal at Ars Technica on IA-64 [arstechnica.com]: a bit old, but a very well written overview of the design theory behind EPIC.

    Hannibal on IA-64 vs. Sun's MAJC [arstechnica.com]: mostly about MAJC (very interesting in its own right!), but a good example of a different approach to VLIW than IA-64's. (Crusoe is yet another example of a completely different approach to VLIW.)

    Paul DeMone's Itanium article on realworldtech.com (unfortunately, the site seems to be down at the moment, so I can't get a link): an impressive technical argument about why Itanium might not actually achieve higher ILP in actual conditions, along with an interesting historical parallel of why this wouldn't be the first time Intel pushed a radical new chip architecture and it completely flopped (I forget the name of the previous chip, but it's an interesting story).

  • Re:Benchmarks? (Score:3)

    by Zagato-sama ( 79044 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @07:47PM (#1064751) Homepage
    I doubt benchmarks from sources other then Intel will be legally available. I for one had to go through a twenty page NDA debriefing
  • Gives new meaning to the words "too little, too late...

    I can see no amount of caffeine is going to save me this late at night. That should be "Too little, Too Late" meaning M$ has some serious catch up to do. Although, with more monkeys to bang on more keyboards, they will come up with something if they get pushed into it.

    I really should go easy on that return button...
  • I for one had to go through a twenty page NDA debriefing
    It was released Wednesday of last week. You can now find the Itanium Processor Microarchitecture Reference Manual at URL http://developer.intel.com/design/ia-64/ ("Spotlight" has the FTP-link). [intel.com]

  • There's other thing you missed: easy implementation and use of large file systems. Since in the standard C interface, the file-system lseek() call for moving around in a file takes a long as the displacement, 32-bit systems (with their 32-bit long datatype) make it really difficult to have functional use of files larger than 2 GB. Those of us in supercomputing have had to deal with this problem for a long time; multimedia will soon make it a necessity for everyone (think how big a 2-hour digital movie is, even MPEG-compressed, when its uncompressed data takes maybe 4 MB per frame, at 24 frames per second or faster (1 minute uncompressed is 5.7 GB). Sound isn't quite as bad... 2 GB of (compressed) MP3 is a very few hours.

  • Um..exactly what do you know about the buggy Windows 2000 for Itanium? And the Linux releases?
  • For all the idiocies involved, ntfs was a 64-bit file-system (with a 64-bit-supporting API) from the word go. Evidently one piece of wisdom BillG did have was to think about the implications of multimedia for file size...

  • Re:What's the advantage of 64 bit? (Score:4)

    by phandel ( 178702 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @07:54PM (#1064757) Journal
    Check out this article [performancecomputing.com] from Performance Computing. Describes the IA-64 and its advantages.
  • I'm not really sure that it's very interesting to see a performance comparison between some 32bit chips and a 64bit chip. I realise that Merced is somewhat backwards compatible with x86 architecture, but lets face it, x86 and 32bit processing are legacy. They are old technologies that will eventually fade.

    However, I would very much like to see Merced pit against an Alpha or perhaps a Sparc Chip.

    Anyone have any info on that kind of stuff?

    Rami James
    Pixel Pusher
    ALST R&D Center, IL
    --
  • Ahem,

    > And at Microsofts head was a man named Bill, who wrote BASIC all from scratch.

    Actually this is questionable.

    > Windows 2k was not Ok. The DOJ got pissed. And they sued MSFT

    The DOJ suit doesn't have anything to do with Windoze2000. Just about some mafia-like behavior by Micro$oft to slash any competitor.

    Smile.

  • Or after all this time waiting does anyone else wonder if this new "wonder" chip will ever see the light of day. I mean with all the problems they have had i.e. Clock speed, it makes one think.
  • See, now I feel a little more enlightened. I did not realise that RedHat did the support deal and actually allowed you to copy their CDs...

    Now, if my favorite 3d app would only go Linux... since that's the only place I really care about making this comp a hot rod. Everything else on here pretty much lets Windoze along its merry little way.

  • Then why did you tell me everything you learned about Itaniums? =D

    Oh whoops, was I supposed to keep that a secret too?
  • I agree that no one feature or 'thing' will make Linux the dominant OS. But one other thing to think about: Software is quickly getting more complex (and in MS's case, much larger), and the development times must suffer accordingly. On the other hand, new hardware is appearing faster (or so it seems). The question is, will any single company be able to keep up with getting their software onto new platforms quickly and reliably? MS is having problems, and they have mind-boggling amounts of resources to throw at it. Linux, on the other hand, gets ported quickly, and almost by habit to new platforms. IMO, the Open Source development model itself will eventually make Linux (etc), a more dominant OS, simply because it's far more responsive. Maybe that's the 'one thing'.

  • Hotchips (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It would'nt surprise me if both Alpha and PA-RISC is faster than the Intel Itanium chip. There are also other egde players like IBM Power ("PowerPC") and UltraSPARC-III that are in the performance game. (MIPS letalone) they are all 64bit sence long time back. (>5 years).
  • [Pro64] is fully compatible with the Red Hat Cygnus gcc and g++ offerings

    what does this mean? is it a gcc back-end or is it a complete compiler of its own?

  • Re:Pre-Alpha Windows on ia64 demonstrated (Score:3)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @09:04PM (#1064767)
    > Microsoft isn't as far behind as some would like to think.

    What I want to know is, how far is the MS version away from going "gold", and more importantly, how much will it rely on the Itanium's 32-bit backward compatibility support for the next 3-4 releases? Windows does not have a good track record on 64-bit architectures.

    > Rest not on your laurels, and keep up the good work.

    Excellent advice. Still, this is something high-profile we can point to next time someone says "OSS is an imitator, always playing catch-up."

    --
  • Also, and smack me if I am wrong here, weren't the 286, 386 and 486 chipsets 16bit?

    DOS was 16bit and so was Win3.1. Some under-lying architecture of Win9x is still 16bit today (remnant of the soundsystem from Win3.x. There are many parts that are still 16bit. If I understand correctly, MS recently over-hauled a large part of the audio system in Windows ME.)

    Rami James
    Pixel Pusher
    --
  • Look your are going to cane me for this

    Actually, no, I'm not. I even agree with much of what you've said. When things do go wrong, the chances of finding someone else with the same problem (and hopefully a solution) are orders of magnitude smaller for non-x86 platforms.

    It does strange things, things that never happen on intel

    What I'm trying to find out is what strange things happen. As I said, I haven't noticed any on non-x86 Linux, and I'm curious about what differences you have found.

  • Unfortunately Nokia is not any more immune against big corporation problems than Intel. In every big company there's at least one sucky boss. If it's not your boss then it's somebody else's.

    It all comes down to individuals. You only need one awful person with power to pollute a healthy working environment. He/she will cause a lot of trouble. As a result skillful people search for a new job. The only ones who are left are used to abuse or carry on the tradition.

    Thanks to these kinds of bosses I've got two wonderful employees who couldn't take it at their old workplaces. Both left a gaping hole in their organisation but nothing else changed.

  • And of course, from the programmer's point of view, one of the things that really differs between IA-32 and IA-64 is that you have loads of more registers to make use of (128 general, 128 floating point). This alleviates the need to shuffle registers to the stack for almost every single operation you do, lessening the stack/memory usage. I mean, if you look at some compiled x86 code, you get really amazed by how much code that is there just for the purpose of shuffeling registers around.

    However, having loads of registers doesn't always make the OS designer very happy. Just think of the amount of memory needed to store the state of a single thread (2KB of registers + some other state). It's an insane amount, especially if you have to do loads of context switches. Fortunately though, the Itanium do contain mechanisms that makes life easier for the OS.

  • Then how can DOS run on a 286?
    Because DOS is not a 32-bit operating system. It and Windows 3.1 are 16-bit operating systems (produced by a two-bit company).

    --

  • I agree with your scenario in general, but StarOffice is probably not less crash-prone than MS Office. If you'll wait for a couple of years for (GNOME|K)Office to become stable, that would probably fit in better.

  • Huh? (Score:1)

    by delmoi ( 26744 )
    How could you compile an emulator for ia-64 with a compiler for ia-64? The resulting emulator would only work on ia-64 chips...
  • I have read say that the long delays are because of horrible performance when executing legacy x86 code. Like Pentium II at 10 times the cost type of performance.

    Reminds me of a certain RAM technology.... Itanium::PentiumIII as RAMBUS::SDRAM
    --

  • It looks like the guy is trying to got back down to a hundred, not the other way around. I may be mistaken, though.
  • Go read the story of how much trouble the GNU tar team had making it a 64-bit-clean portable app... It was quite a problem for them.

  • I wouldn't call news from MS overdue. I was in Win2K training back in Sept./Oct. and they were talking about the 64bit Win2K then. The answer about when was "As soon as Intel releases the chip.". I also know someone that does Win2K testing on new servers for one of the big manufacturers and they already have it in testing and are getting trained on it.


  • intel ported mach + linux as chip validation (some way to valdate chips (-;)

    so they have to release this most of the core programs X, bash, & csh compile fine for 64bit anyway so whats the big deal ??

    HP seem to have taken the IA64 emulation libs off the website or they where never there as the SGI links are broken and HP dont have them on the website anywhere

    gcc is important and is SAD to see that GCC is not F95 compliant and yet SGI have one

    I hope SGI kicks itels Butt when it comes to chipset SGI have great IP in the BUS area with high perf crossbar switching a standard

    if they can sort out the chipset and do the right thing with the graphics they will kick apples sorry little ass when it comes to DV editing and conet creation but only if you have the raw power their (plus they said they would port maya to linux ;-)

    anyway I hope they sort the chipset and graphics out or they will be out of the market

    john


    (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)

  • Linux is looking like one of the "Official" or "Intel Supported" OSs for this platform. Therefor people will be buying $50K to $500K machines from VALinux and running Linux on them.


    Linux will be supported on IA64 by SGI and HP, and maybe some others that I don't know about. Does anybody out there have more info on Compaq, IBM, Sun, etc.?

    The point being that VA Linux is going to have some pretty stiff competition in this high-end market.

    Linux makes very good sense for this market because the people who want this big iron typically want to do special things with it. Linux gives them the opportunity to tweak things to their hearts content, while coalescing around a single OS, instead of all the different proprietary OSes.

    In the high-end, I'd have to say Linux has a big edge on Windows NT. Microsoft would love to get into the high end, because it's very profitable. But in the high end, their patronizing "so simple your mother could use it" design philosophy works against them, as does the closedness.


    But that's a lot different than the desktop, where I still give them the edge.

  • With Intel's investments in Linux companies like Red Hat and TurboLinux, it was only a matter of time before these companies would have alpha-grade ports available, even if mainstream hardware isn't available.

    If I'm not mistaken, TurboLinux [turbolinux.com] was the first Linux distro ported to and released for IA-64, about two months ago.

    March 20 press release [turbolinux.com]

    < tofuhead >

  • Forget the Itanium, I just got MkLinux up and running on a 66 Mhz PowerPC 601 (7100 Macintosh) that I bought for $100!! I just picked up a nubus ethernet card for $10, and this baby's gonna make a sweet router! :-)

  • Call me crazy, but if this all comes together, it might be one big K.O. for Microsoft. Think about it: between the government suit, the apparent *nix advantage in the 64bit chip area, and the fact that Linux and other non-MS things are starting to succeed more, this all might come together and, well.... BOOM.

    Well at least, I hope so :).

  • In all seriousness, I wasn't trying to attack Microsoft on the merits of DOS and Win3.x (which, I'll admit, seemed nifty to me at the time), but rather to inject a little humor into my comment. :)

    --

  • As noted on redhat's own news site, Microsoft has demonstrated pre-alpha versions of windows on ia64 [wideopen.com]. The "Stunning news from MS on this front is long overdue." comment is somewhat off-base. Microsoft isn't as far behind as some would like to think. Rest not on your laurels, and keep up the good work.

  • Well, the latest Platform SDK has 64bit build tools and headers for Win64. So I'm guessing they're not that far behind. According to MS, it should be simply a recompile to get your software running on Win64. They have free tools that will help you detect potential porting problems.

  • Re:Benchmarks? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I for one had to go through a twenty page NDA debriefing

    Post the entire thing anonymously and let Slashdot take the blame.
  • Does the emulator emulate the IA-64's IA-32 emulation? :)
  • I tried linux on a Digital Alpha and this _cured_ me of most of my desire to try alternative platforms. The trouble is that a whole lot of things just dont work on other than the X86 platform. Unless you can get a particular benefit from the chipset, for example the alphas fpu, I would suggest you stick with ia32.

    Don't get me wrong, I like the multi-platform ability of linux and I think that the S390 and StrongARM ports are especially cool, I just wonder how sucessfull ia64 is going to be. Particularly against established platforms such as alpha and sparc

    It will proberbly be huge, just to spite me, but let me just say that I wont be a early adopter!!
  • > It's really not the "64-bit" that makes it better / faster

    However, if you have been doing scientific calculations using 64-bit numerics on a 32-bit machine, I would expect you to see very substantial performance strictly from the "64bitness" of the new system.

    --
  • This is my take on things.

    The success of Linux in the home desktop market is going to follow sucess in the business and education market. People run at home what they use at work or school. My father uninstalled Star Office and bought Office 97, because that was what he used at work. He's not stupid. He just wants to use one tool in both places, home and work.

    Home consumers aren't going to be buying these 64 bit PC's for a while, but businesses and universities are. And that's significant. Alf from marketing, and part time Quake/Unreal Tournament adict, sees the new server crunching away at 64 bits, ohhs and ahhs with the rest of the IT guys, and then goes out and buys one to play games with.

    Or something like anyway. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I think the home market will follow the other markets, and those other markets are the ones likely to adopt the Itanium.

  • That would be an ultra sparc, 'regular' sparcs are 32 bit.
  • Everything above a 286 has been 32 bit. (That's why there is this magic boundary for linux between the 286 and the 386, not counting ELKS ofcourse).

    Jeroen

  • Don't forget about forestalling the Y2.038K 'bug' for another few billion years!

    Eric
  • Theory one: Management guru Peter Drucker is famous for saying that in order for a new product/brand to overthrow the market leader, it has to be ten times better. This is because of the high cost in time and effort of switching. If we're talking in terms of uptime, I think Linux is thousands of times better than Windows. But by other measures, like ease of use, it may or may not be better and it certainly isn't ten times better. If Linux were a company, it would take too long and the company would go out of business before it supplanted Windows. Since Linux is free, it can't go out of business and we can all wait as long as it takes for Linux to gradually supplant Windows. To reduce the very long wait, we'd have to improve Linux to make it ten times better.

    Theory two: I'm just starting to read The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker. His thesis is that by applying theories from the field of epidemiology to other situations you can find explanations for seemingly inexplicable fads or trends. He argues that the same rules that apply to the spread of the flu apply to anything that is contagious. We all can attest to the contagious nature of Linux, so according to Gladwell it is simply a matter of reaching critical mass. He would say that there is a threshold, perhaps a percentage of users who switch to Linux, which acts as a "tipping point" where suddenly the balance is shifted and suddenly everyone else will switch. One of his examples in the book is fax machines, which came on the market in the seventies, but didn't reach critical mass until 1987 when enough people had them that it suddenly became something that everyone had to have. For cell phones, he says this happened in 1998, when the late adopters started buying them in droves. So we need to keep spreading the Linux germ, infecting our friends and acquaintances until we reach critical mass. It would be interesting to look at past shifts, like Wordperfect->MSWord or Lotus123->MSExcel, to see what percentage threshold was the tipping point. It may still be years away, but I like this theory, because it would be fun to see Linux flying off the shelves in glory as Windows drowns in its own $#!%.

    "What I cannot create, I do not understand."

  • Six months ago my prediction was that Win-64 would be underwhelming or impossible -- Win32 is just too entrenched and when you have 65 million lines of code to port, things could get ugly. At the time my thinking was that the IA64 would be tied to Windows and would for that reason be similarly underwhelming.

    Since then I attended an SGI presentation about what they were doing to the IA64 GCC (Changes that will be or have been released to the Open Source community) and I changed my mind. Windows may be underwhelming on Itanium, but UNIX/Linux will be amazing. The timing couldn't be better, since we're just starting to see a corporate resurgance of UNIX, so I expect a lot of big companies to go to IA64 for server farms, web servers and the like.

    I doubt it'll be as big a hit on the consumer level since the systems will probably end up being extremely expensive.

  • I hate to say it... (Score:5)

    by jerdenn ( 86993 ) <jerdenn@dennany.org> on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @08:12PM (#1064808)
    In a press release [microsoft.com] on Feb 17, 2000, Microsoft already anounced that they had released The IA-64 SDK for 64-bit Windows.

    It includes a 64-bit server version of Windows 2000, a Microsoft C/C++ compiler and linker for IA-64, Intel C++ and FORTRAN 90 compilers for 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Windows 2000 libraries, header files and run-time libraries.

    I supposed that I will be marked down as trolling. I'm not. I'm merely pointing out that this story was not properly researched before posting.

    Linux is not the first to release a 64-bit Alpha release for the Itanium. The biggest difference here is that the Linux Alpha is available to the general public, while the Win64 version is only available to OEMs and key ISVs.

    -jerdenn

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