[rescue] The end of alpha

[Chris Petersen]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 12:59:11PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On June 25, Chris Petersen wrote:
> > On the other hand, from what I've read about Itanium up until now, this was
> > probably the *only* way Intel could make that chip usable...They should just
> > flat out replace the thing...
> 
>   Yeah...it's a pretty sad state of affairs.  I wonder what it would
> take to make Intel admit to the world that they're a bunch of
> blithering idiots who have NO FUCKING IDEA how to design high-speed
> processors.
> 
> 
>               -Dave McGuire

I don't know, but I'd sure like to know the $$ value attached to this whole
deal - that would be an amusing tidbit/metric for exactly how many
blithering idiots to the dollar Intel had to replace...(Exactly what is that
in mathmetical notation, BI/USD?)

Actually, I just finished reading through *all* the slide shows and docs
available at Q's site - they also make a huge deal about compilers.  DEC/Paq
has/had some of the best compiler guys around.  After all, Tru64 was the
only major Unix vendor to still bundle a C compiler, and a top-notch one at
that.  I hear the Linux variant is pretty good as well.  Given that the key
to performance out of the "EPIC" architecture that Itanium uses is good
compilers, this might have had a lot to do with the deal.

The other point they bring up again and again is that Compaq, by freeing
itself of microprocessor architecture development, has freed up corporate
resources (read dollars) to devote towards OS improvements and porting. 
Given that Compaq has already done the majority to the work in porting Tru64
to IA-64 (remember "Bravo"?) and supposedly the VMS crew has ported VMS to
ride on top of a Mach kernel, I doubt they'll be blowing a lot of the
dollars on porting.  Tru64 is already a beautiful OS to work with, if they
keep improving it and pushing it out into the common Itanium arena, this
could be a really good thing...But I'm dangerously close to triggering
another OS holy war, so I'll leave this here...

Chris

-- 
Chris Petersen
Systems Engineer, Industry Services, Unigraphics Solutions Inc.
Co-founder, auctions.workstations.org
Email: havoc at apk.net