[geeks] Re: HP's squandering

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 02:40:12PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   Wow, THREE whole installations!
> 
>   Do you personally know of anyone, anywhere, who has bought, is 
> planning to buy, or has used, or has even seen an Itanium-based PC?
> 
>   I know one person...James Sharp...who played with one briefly on a 
> test-drive program maybe two years ago.

I know someone who has used them and is hoping to get MU to buy a stack
for a performance computing lab.  Well, know might be a bit strong.  He
is a MU professor though.  He started at the beginning of my last semester.
 
> >Perhaps that will change.  I'm kinda hopefull at the moment since I
> >think that this is a big improvement over the x86 line, and I like the
> >idea of such explicit paralelization on a single processor.
> 
>   Well, I have to agree.  To clarify, I personally have nothing against 
> the Itanium, I think it's an interesting architecture.  My anti-Itanium 
> comments are based on the fact that the Itanium has failed in the 
> marketplace, and it's likely that its replacement, Itanium2, will also 
> fail for the same reason.


 
>   I also don't like the way Intel has spent the past ten years 
> poo-pooing other companies' modern processor architectures as 
> "proprietary processors" (and if x86 isn't exactly that, I don't know 
> what is!) that are incompatible with x86 family...then they come up 
> with EXACTLY THAT...and expect the whole world to embrace it, expect it 
> to become wildly popular just because it's from Intel.  Nice attitude.
> 
>   That said, I'd like to get my hands on an Itanium box to play with a 
> little bit.  But they're so rare that the only way to buy one is brand 
> new, which I'm certainly not going to do...I'm willing to shell out 
> maybe $350 for one.

There are usually a few on ebay.  They mostly seem to be servers.  I saw
a pair of workstations once, and they looked like they might be
reasonable, but I didn't watch what they actually ended up closing at.
It is interesting to me that Itanium CPUs are affordable, but
motherboards are nearly unobtainium.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd