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Microsoft IT

Itanium Will Only Be Partly Supported by Longhorn 234

Posted by Hemos from the the-diminishing-roles dept.
ver.sicher.ungsvergleich writes "Although stopping short of pulling the plug entirely on Itanium, MS has said that Longhorn will only be able to work for a limited number of higher-end jobs. On the positive side, Microsoft does see a future for the chip, but that 'big iron' slot is not exactly what Chipzilla envisioned as Itanium's future."
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Itanium Will Only Be Partly Supported by Longhorn More

Itanium Will Only Be Partly Supported by Longhorn

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  • Role for emulation? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:20AM (#13483244)
    Microsoft recently bought Connectix, makers of VirtualPC, ostensibly to use their system virtualisation technology in new Microsoft products.

    Will virtual X86 servers running on Itanium be an available option to supply services not supported by native Itanium code?

    • Re:Role for emulation? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Microsoft recently bought Connectix, makers of VirtualPC, ostensibly to use their system virtualisation technology in new Microsoft products.

      You call February 19, 2003 recent? C'mon man, at least do some research. That's over two human years and 14 dog years. That's 23.46 technology years! This [google.com] Google search turns up links regarding Microsoft's purchase. This [microsoft.com] is the second link in the search!

      Jesus christ, I knew slashdot was behind by a couple weeks when they reported things but you could usually rely

  • I think it's time to pull the plug (Score:5, Funny)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:21AM (#13483255) Homepage Journal
    on Longhorn.

    Where the hell is Netcraft when you need it?

  • Yay! (Score:3, Funny)

    by machinegunhand ( 867735 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:23AM (#13483265) Homepage
    Does this mean I can get out of my MS EULA now?

  • Intel is losing it's edge (Score:3, Insightful)

    by confusion ( 14388 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:24AM (#13483268) Homepage
    Between this and their roadmap that almost exclusively involves power consumption improvements, Intel is starting to lose it's edge over AMD.
    From talking to Intel folks quite a bit, it seems like there is a lot of blind pride on Intel's part in their product line and vision, and they dismiss most anything that I raise as an issue with their performance vs. AMD, and that's not a good sign to me.
    Intel is not dying that's for sure, but they're going to have to make a course correction and not make another decade long mistake like itanium.

    Jerry
    http://www.cyvin.org/ [cyvin.org]
    • Starting to lose its edge?

      Brother, the Athlon 64 was the file that flattened that edge down to nice rounded stump.
    • I'm probably way off (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing as they say) but as I understand it, most of the money in the comming years will be in mobile technologies. Big improvements in batteries and this move to fuel cells etc will offer more power but efficiency of the processor will still be hugely important. Particularly considering processor tech is at a level that even basic models offer more than enough power for most users. Of course the server market is different I'm sure (and being completely
      • Ah, servers, yes. Immortal power supplies and HVAC doesn't come cheap; when you start having to live within a power and BTU budget, being able to drop a few KW per rack is *really* appealing.

        This comes hand-in-hand with multiple-cores per chip; server applications tend to have a lot of concurrency, so trading off some raw performance per core for the ability to fit 2-4 on a single chip with a sensible power envelope is a great win. So what if a single core has 30% less throughput if you have twice as many
    • If that's not a course correction, what do you think is?

      You may dismiss power consumption improvements, but if you think about it carefully, improving power consumption IS improving performance.

      If you can halve the power consumption of a chip, it means you have the energy budget to now 'double' the power consumption of a chip, and possible double the performance.

      Their netburst architecture hit a power wall; its pretty difficult to operate 120W CPUs. If they can get the same performance at 12W, and then incr

  • I hate 3 day weekends. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:24AM (#13483269)
    Talk about slow news day.

    Intel is in transition as far as processor direction, so there's no suprise here. Itanium has been dead for a while. The Microsoft "support" is there only because it's already been written and there probably is some support agreements already in place.

    The real news would be what the sucessor to x86 will be.

  • Is this really a big deal? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CTho9305 ( 264265 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:25AM (#13483277) Homepage
    Sure, Intel may have originally hoped to migrate the world to IA64, but given the wild success of AMD64 in bringing 64-bit to the x86 world, it doesn't look like that's happening. The Itanium chips Intel is releasing are obviously not aimed at tasks that could be handled by a 386 with some SCSI drives ("fax server"? a file server?)... who is going to use a multi-thousand-dollar CPU for anything other than database|web|high-end server anyway?

    • Re:Is this really a big deal? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by el_womble ( 779715 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:36AM (#13483365) Homepage
      OK - I know nothing about this, so it is a genuine question.

      Should we be pleased that Itanium failed?

      I mean, on one hand /. hates x86 bloatedness, on the other hand we slapdown this attempt by intel to escape the aging architecture. If AMD hadn't stepped up and provided a chip that does both 32 and 64 bit ops would we finally be on the verge of dropping x86 all together?

      Are there reasons other than poor support from Micorsoft for Itanics massive failure? Is it a poor arcitecture?

      Like I said, I genuinely don't know.

      • Re:Is this really a big deal? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jiushao ( 898575 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:56AM (#13483490)
        Are there reasons other than poor support from Micorsoft for Itanics massive failure? Is it a poor arcitecture?

        In the world of good compilers originally envisioned by HP/Intel: No.
        In practice: Yes.

        Why? Because compilers aren't nearly as good as HP/Intel hoped but state of the art Out-of-Order processors are great. There is only so much theorethically possible ILP to extract in regular code, and good OoO chips extract most of it in an automatic fashion from existing code. So the hardware guys did a better job here than the software guys, and the Itanium bet on software.

        To clarify on OoO processors doing most of the possible work in extracting ILP: Even if the instruction window was increased to infinity (that is, all ILP is always found) it would still not yield dramatically much better performance (I have seen estimates of about 25% best-case). So even with a perfect compiler there is just not much to gain, and we do not have perfect compilers. This very high level of performance in extracting ILP is what is forcing the new shift to TLP with architectures like the Sun Niagara.

        I don't think we should be pleased that the Itanium failed. As I have often discussed in the past I think Intel really deserves a lot of credit, they are the undisputed top dog in the market, and despite that they are also one of the companies that consistently attempt new different approaches in high-profile products. Neither the Itanium nor the Netburst (which really is interesting and innovative technology) worked out well, but it is trying things that makes technology move forward.

        That's not to say that AMD is a bad company, they managed to make the best x86 implementation yet, which is great (though I still consider the K7 to have been the golden age since their pricing structure truly was incredible then).

        • I don't have mod points, but I want to thank you for a nice, coheirent post on why both current microprocessor companies are good. Not too many of us left here on /.
      • You forgot one thing in your analysis: Itanium architecture is only in the hand of Intel (maybe HP too? Don't know if they have the rights to produce CPUs), whereas x86 can be made by Intel, AMD, IBM, Cyrix, etc..

        While I dislike very much the Itanium architecture (PPC, Alpha, ARM Thumb2 mmmh), it is obviously much better than the POS x86 that Intel made.. but removing competition?
        I'll stick with x86, thanks!
    • They had the Intel i860 architecture fail in the 1990s. Remember, Windows NT originally targetted those chips.

      But they're a big company. They will overcome such failures.

  • what is amazing... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:25AM (#13483280) Journal
    is that chip companies do not work harder to make OSS their premier OS on their chips. MS will only support a small group of chips as it is expensive and hard to support a load of these. As such, if MS does not see an advantage to themselves, they are not going to bother with it (as it should be). But if a chips company makes OSS-based OS their premier OS, they then control their future. Intel and HP have spent billions trying to get Itanium to be the major server chip. But it will die partialy due to MSs choice.
    • I seem to remember that architectures supporting their own OS only haven't historically lasted too long.
      • Very short memory, then.
        1. OS 3xx
        2. OS-32/34/36/38/400
        3. PDP-Vax.
        4. Dec Unix.
        5. HP-UX on pa-risc.
        6. Solaris on sparc.


        In fact, other than Intel, only chips that had either company supported OS or an OS that was not under control of somebody else , has had a long life. And x86 arch. has outlived its purpose only due to an illegal monopoly (as in unnatural) in MS (and probably Intel as well).

    • Re:what is amazing... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nchip ( 28683 )
      Majority of Itanium cpu's sold already run Linux. Rest run HPUX. Intel,HP and SGI work do hard to make Linux run well on Itanium. With Linux having most compilable software readily available, it is probably the best thing to run on a niche arch anyway.

      So what this article may actually mean, is that there is no market for _windows_ in Itanium space anymore. Which isn't that suprising, when there is hardly any windows/ia64 applications, what use an empty OS is?

      IMO what Itanium needs to become a success, is a
  • This makes sense. The Itanic^Hum is actually quite good at running Fortran programs with enormous DO loops, but Intel and AMD x86oid processors are better at everything else -- including running Windows itself.

    The Itanium was the only realistic chance we had to get away from the x86 for the forseeable future, and the designers blew it. So sad. Excuse me while I start one of my Leonard Cohen albums, I need something to cheer me up.

    • Re:Fortran programmers don't need (or want) Window (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slavemowgli ( 585321 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:43AM (#13483414) Homepage
      I think you fail to realise an important thing: change typically happens by evolution, not revolution, and that's even more true when there's a multi-billion dollar industry involved. Do you honestly believe that everyone's just going to throw every system they have away?

      It's not gonna happen. The industry likes migration/upgrade paths, and in 90% of all cases, a design that extends is gonna win over one that outright replaces.

      Intel seems to have been unwilling to face that fact, but what they failed to realise is that their monopoly is not big enough to simply force change on people - rather, their move just gave AMD etc. an opportunity to slowly but steadily chip away at that monopoly.

      From a market perspective, that's a good thing, of course - but if I was an Intel shareholder, I'd demand that heads roll for this gross mismanagement in the top executive floor.
      • Intel certainly misjudged the market with Itanium, which is a shame. It would be wonderful to have chips in the consumer channel that were as good as Alphas, UltraSPARCs, PA-RISCs, etc. There are very good arguments for just dropping x86 as lacking future improvement potential. Intel managed to do that, and still have a compatibility layer for the old x86 software. If they could've gotten the price down on the Itaniums, there would probably have been a good market for them.

        Instead, you have companies, l

    • Re:Fortran programmers don't need (or want) Window (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @12:01PM (#13483512) Journal
      The Itanium was the only realistic chance we had to get away from the x86 for the forseeable future, and the designers blew it.

      PowerPC/POWER is still viable, and IBM may have another go at putting them in consumer machines if an OS that runs on PPC becomes popular in the desktop space.

      ARM-derived chips are still going strong. At IDF there was an XScale chip demo'd that ran at 1.25GHz - probably fast enough for 90% of users.

      Alpha remains my all time favourite architecture - pure 64-bit, and the PAL code concept is remarkably elegant.

  • Vista? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Um, what happened to the Windows "Vista" moniker?

    • Re:Vista? (Score:3, Informative)

      by CyricZ ( 887944 )
      That's the problem with using codenames for products, especially in these circumstances. The codenames often become far more widely known and used than the product name.

      When it comes to this software, many techies will continue to refer to Windows Vista as "Longhorn", which will no doubt confuse many regular users.

      Now instead of having one coherent name known throughout the marketplace (ie. Windows Vista), the name has been fragmented (ie. Longhorn, Windows NT 6.0, etc.).

      • That's the problem with using codenames for products, especially in these circumstances. The codenames often become far more widely known and used than the product name.

        I'm sure they'd love to use the eventual product name as the codename, but you can't rush marketing. The marketing people require full technical specifications, comprehensive feature lists, and functional demos before they can even BEGIN the hard work of naming. They need to go over all the possible synergies with parallel products, and c

      • That's the whole idea! They want people to be confused, and think they have to buy all three.

        "I only have Windows Vista, but I also need Longhorn and NT 6.0. I'd better get to the new Microsoft Store in Times Square!"

      • Re:Vista? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Jugalator ( 259273 )
        I really doubt that... Do you hear many speak of Windows Chicago, Windows Memphis, or Windows Whistler today? Longhorn will quickly fade as the Microsoft marketing machine comes into play, just like we got Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows XP respectively above.

        You speak of fragmentation too... Do you hear a lot of confusion between what Windows 2000 and NT 5.0 is? Do you hear many call Windows XP as NT 5.1? Windows 2003 Server as NT 5.2?

        It's the marketing machine that decides, unless maybe for a percenta

      • Re:Vista? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jacksonj04 ( 800021 )
        Even MSDN itself confuses terms, advertising Vista downloads on the public pages but referring to Longhorn in all the downloads for subscribers. The software calls itself Vista, but the download title is "Windows Longhorn Beta 1"
      • maybe up towards release and for a short time after the codename may remain used by some but i can't imagine the codename will get used much by anyone after that.

        do you hear anyone calling 98 "memphis" or XP "whistler" nowadays?
    • TFA is talking about Longhorn Server. Longhorn Server does not have a shipping name, and is still under the Longhorn codename.

      Vista (being the Longhorn intended for Homes and Small Offices) will likely not support Itanium at all... but don't take my word as gospel on that, I don't know for certain.

      But Longhorn Server is most definitely *not* Vista.
    • This is Longhorn SERVER we're talking about; and edition of Windows that hasn't seen much attention until now.

      We're not talking about Vista; precisely what the marketing name of Longhorn Server will be hasn't yet come out of MS. Ship dates for Longhorn Server haven't been set either - I'm betting a fair while after Vista ships; similar to the lag from Windows XP (a desktop os) to Windows Server 2003 being released.

      (MS produce Server and Desktop versions of their OS's. XP and Vista are desktop; 2003 is ser
  • "Big Iron" ? ...

    I think you meant "Pig Iron" :P

    Tee hee

  • Vista isnt the thing (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Zo0ok ( 209803 )
    The interesting thing isnt really whether Vista/Longhorn will support Itanium, but whether Windows Server will.

    Of course, a few years ago Intel hoped to put Itanium in workstations, but they can hardly have hoped much for that lately. No, Itanium is for servers, and there is Windows Server.

    However, internally Windows Server is the same shit as Windows Vista, so if they dont support it in one, they probably dont find it very strategic to support it in the other. And as we all know, Itanium is much more dying

  • New Design Getting Flushed Away (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SumDog ( 466607 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:38AM (#13483378) Homepage Journal
    It is rare when someone comes up with an entirely new architecture and instruction set. The IA64 was a complete break and had it been pushed correctly, AMD would be rushing to make IA64 clones instead of Intel supporting AMDs 64-bit extension.

    If I remember correctly, the IA64 has 128 general purpose registers and 128 floating point registers. It's a load/store machine and it's pretty close to a RISC arch (really it's an "very long word" instruction set, but lets not get picky).

    It was a chance to make a clean break from the old 32-bit legacy chips, however the price was and is too high and AMDs are cheaper and still very powerful.

    I really hope this chip doesn't die off. At least with limited support in the new Windows, it will still have a strong server market, but I think a lot of companies are going to be afraid to buy because of running into compatibility problems. I know at where I work, we'd like to have servers that can do anything/general purpose. You put a limit on what the OS can do and then you're afraid of old legacy or propriety software not working correctly

    But hey as long as you use Linux, the IA64 is fairly well supported, and it will be better supported in Linux than in Windows!

    Sumdog
    • Actually, the Itanium design is 32 accessible registers at any given time with a "sliding window" design for accessing some 16~24 of them (I don't remember the raw number off hand).

      What this allows one to do is just slide the window further down the line before making a function call, or sliding the window around while doing a loop, so you can perform some loop operations without changing the instruction's declared register usage, but rather just by sliding the window.

      As the register window rotates around,

      • Re:New Design Getting Flushed Away (Score:4, Informative)

        by The Ego ( 244645 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @01:44PM (#13484099)
        The parent is not quite correct.

        The Itanium instruction sets allows code to access between 32 and 128 general registers (aka integer registers), at the discretion of the piece of code, and 128 floating point registers. The sliding window design is for the integer registers 32-127 and can indeed be considered as a sliding window on a memory stack. It is up to each piece of code to decide how many registers it wants to use (in increments of 8 ?).

          On top of that there is the ability to design a subset of the high registers (registers with an index higher than 32) as rotating. This makes modulo-pipelining worthwile by removing the requirement for register-to-register moves to push things down the (conceptual) pipeline at each iteration of the loop.
        • So, how does it work that the Itanium2 has 256 registers and is still fully compatible with previous Itanium code?

          Please explain.

          An accurate mapping of the accessible register window would be very clarifying. I just remember myself that there are a number of registers that are always accessible and don't get shifted through the window (like the gp, the sp, and the rp) But I also know that a number of registers also are in the register shift window. I just don't know where the split is, and how large th w

    • Re:New Design Getting Flushed Away (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sean23007 ( 143364 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @01:17PM (#13483945) Homepage Journal
      Actually AMD probably wouldn't be rushing to make IA64 clones. They wouldn't be allowed to. Decades ago, Intel was forced to license the x86 technology to another manufacturer to prevent a 100% monopoly in the general purpose consumer chip market. Obviously, Intel doesn't like this at all, since it basically means they can't beat AMD as long as the world is still on x86. (They can still hold the lion's share of the market and make a metric shit ton of money, but they can't win, because AMD has to be there.)

      One of the lesser known reasons for Intel's plan to develop and push the Itanium was that it would be a clean break with x86, which means that AMD would not be allowed to make them. Intel would be the only supplier allowed to make the chip. Then they'd get sued for it, and would settle by giving rights to manufacture them to some small company with one fab that's a generation or two behind. AMD would have been stuck with x86, and Intel would have won. (Bear in mind that if the switch had been successful, Itanium would have been adopted long before x86-64 and the Opteron were developed.)

      Frankly, I'm glad the Itanium failed. Even though it's a pretty cool chip with an interesting design, I'd rather have Opterons available than not.
    • ``It is rare when someone comes up with an entirely new architecture and instruction set. The IA64 was a complete break and had it been pushed correctly, AMD would be rushing to make IA64 clones instead of Intel supporting AMDs 64-bit extension.

      If I remember correctly, the IA64 has 128 general purpose registers and 128 floating point registers. It's a load/store machine and it's pretty close to a RISC arch (really it's an "very long word" instruction set, but lets not get picky).''

      And that's where you go wr
    • ``It was a chance to make a clean break from the old 32-bit legacy chips, however the price was and is too high and AMDs are cheaper and still very powerful.''

      That's another point. It's not like IA64 was the only chance to break from the x86 cruft. I mean, PowerPC is doing very well, and I don't think there's a good reason the world couldn't have switched to Alpha or MIPS, either.

      The success of AMD64 shows that people don't _want_ to break away from x86. In the world of closed-source software, backward comp
    • > had it been pushed correctly

      Intel spent billions marketing IA64. They gave away lots of expensive hardware to developers. They used their monopoly muscle, and cash, to strongarm all the big industry software and hardware manufacturers into supporting it. They persuaded several companies to abandon their own architectures and bet on IA64 for the future. They ensured that analysts everywhere were united in hailing IA64 as the wave of the future. It COULD NOT have been pushed harder.

      It's a measure of just

  • Shades of Pentium Pro (Score:2, Interesting)

    by n76lima ( 455808 )
    Its deja vu all over again.

    MS was slow to get 32 bit support to the Pentium Pro, and Intel twisted in the wind for a couple years with expensive chips and no support for the mainstream.

    Now we have Itanium64 and MS is again (very) late with support, and now saying that the much promised and never yet delivered Longhorn will not give the support to Itanium that it will need.

    Maybe Intel ought not to accept MS's promise of support for new chip architectures and look to FOSS for their hot new chip's support for
    • It really doesn't matter if Intel would prefer some open source OS or Windows running on their chips. What matters is what the customers want. If the customers want Windows, even if they must wait several years for Microsoft to offer such support, then that is what Intel will have to live with.

      It'll do no good for Intel if open source OSes support their chips years before Windows does, but relatively few people want to use the non-Windows operating systems.

    • Actually not. Remember, Windows NT 3.5x and 4.0 versions did support the full functionality of the Pentium Pro in true WIN32 API mode, so the Pentium Pro wasn't really a complete failure (it was the choice for server machines for quite a while).

      Besides, the Pentium Pro CPU core design became the basis for the Pentium II, Pentium III and Celeron CPU's.
    • Pentium Pro was not the First x86 to be 32 bit. Not by a long shot. That honor goes to the 386SX. That got 32 bit support with Windows NT 3.3, I belive, although you could argue that there was not a mainstream 32 bit operating system until Windows XP Home. (Win2k was, but was too expensive for most, as was NT 4.0, 95, 98, and ME were still wrappers for DOS, although they ran many 32bit apps. The honor the Pentium Pro has is that it is the first x86 to not be an x86. Intel at that point switched from a

    • Maybe Intel ought not to accept MS's promise of support for new chip architectures and look to FOSS for their hot new chip's support for the first couple years.

      I suppose you think it's just some happy coincidence that Apple is going to start using Intel chips? I think Intel has had enough of Microsoft dictating their success or failure.

      Apple will be more than happy to include Intel's new whiz-bang chips they come up with in their products. If the yields aren't that great it doesn't matter because Appl

  • Xserves? (Score:3, Funny)

    by pepicek ( 710120 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:47AM (#13483437)
    And what about Itanium in Apple servers? Does anybody think it's possible?

  • Also supported (Score:4, Funny)

    by KoolDude ( 614134 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:51AM (#13483462)

    Itanium Will Only Be Partly Supported by Longhorn

    ...the Microsoft executive also added that MyDoom, NetSky, Sobig, Sasser and MSBlast will be fully supported out of the box.
  • "On the positive side, Microsoft does see a future for the chip..."

    Sorry, what's positive about that? I guess 99.9% of slashdotters could not care less.
  • Itanium is a joke.

    Its all the things these newer PentiumV's and PentiumMII's that are coming out, supposed to be. They are VLIW and use very little power, slim, and efficient.

    Itanium was supposed to really take off back in 1997 according to all the analysists. How many years is that? Good lord!

    HP shot itself in the foot because they had no concept of sunkin investments or sunk costs and demanded everyone use their hogs with full 1 pound heat sinks and a fan that sounds like a jet engine taking off.

    To me the

  • "On the positive side" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by norwoodites ( 226775 ) <pinskia@ g m a il.com> on Monday September 05, 2005 @12:33PM (#13483674) Journal
    Is that really a positive side? Everyone I know in the compiler world (well GCC world) complains very much about the ia64 architecture. So why do people think this is a positive side, when really it is a negative side of the world.
  • ...the perfect architecture for OS/2.
  • Did anyone else read that first line as:

    Although stopping short of pulling the plug entirely on Itanium, MS has said ver.sicher.ungsvergleich

    MS tears technobabble a new one.

  • What will Longhorn/ Vista have? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by joelsanda ( 619660 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @12:55PM (#13483784) Homepage

    Everything I've read on Slashdot and Wired talks to what will not be in Longhorn. What will be in Longhorn that will make it better than XP? More and different vulnerabilities? (Maybe it will ship with a demo .wmv file showing Microsoft executive throwing chairs around offices in response to other MS executives leaving for Google!)

    Seriously ... though I'm an Apple user from before Macs were released I've also used every version of Windows - always at work but I've also had every version except XP at home.

    With each new Mac OS X release I look forward to what will be in that version - but there's little talk around the water cooler regarding what will actually be in Longhorn/ Vista. Unlike Mac OS releases, which people anticipate because of stuff like Dashboard, iTunes integration, .Mac integration, Spotlight and Automator, all I hear is what Longhorn/ Vista won't have ...

  • What the Alpha engineers thought about Itanium (Score:3, Informative)

    by pesc ( 147035 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @02:46PM (#13484453)
    This document (PDF) is from 1999 and explains why the Alpha engineers thought Alpha would win over Itanium.

    http://www.raytheon-computers.com/ref_docs/alpha_i a64.pdf [raytheon-computers.com]

    The rest we know; the Alpha was ditched when HP bought Compaq (who bought DEC earlier), because HP wanted to eliminate any threats to its Itanium bet.

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