Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 25 May 2001, 5:50 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Wednesday
23/05/2001
Intel's been around a while now, so the company's got experience in making the best of a bad thing. As, one suspects, the infinitely delayed Itanium chip may well turn out to be. Products with the processor are now due 'later this year' says Intel's best mate Dell, and although they'll run 64-bit software and be called macho names like PowerEdge the continued lack of benchmarking information isn't a good sign that they'll be hog-whimperingly fast.
But then, the need for speed has never seemed quite so quaint. With multiprocessor systems getting more interesting and the traditional supercomputer market now entirely usurped by rooms full of old-fashioned processors, nobody seems that bothered that Itanium is and will be slow and late. When Intel does make the architecture fulfil its promise, will anyone care?
23/05/2001
Intel's been around a while now, so the company's got experience in making the best of a bad thing. As, one suspects, the infinitely delayed Itanium chip may well turn out to be. Products with the processor are now due 'later this year' says Intel's best mate Dell, and although they'll run 64-bit software and be called macho names like PowerEdge the continued lack of benchmarking information isn't a good sign that they'll be hog-whimperingly fast.
But then, the need for speed has never seemed quite so quaint. With multiprocessor systems getting more interesting and the traditional supercomputer market now entirely usurped by rooms full of old-fashioned processors, nobody seems that bothered that Itanium is and will be slow and late. When Intel does make the architecture fulfil its promise, will anyone care?
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