intel itaniun...!!!!!!

Originally posted by cluthu
>I heard that new Athlons are better.........!
As of right now the new Athlons are better. The Itanium isn't likely to really be able to shine, as it were, until its made to run an OS that's compiled with 64-bit extentions. Supposedly Itanium, like most first gen products, is actually more of a 'stepping stone.' That is, Itanium's successor will be the chip that Intel will place more marketing muscle.

Of course, AMD's bringing out a 64-bit processor that's good at both 64 and 32 bit operations.

Time, as they say, will tell.

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yes, there is quite a latency between release the cpu and using the optimized compilers. Don't expect to the Itanium to shine once its released, albeit, Intel is really delayed as it is. Itaniums succesor McKinley is generally thought as to be superior to the Itanium. Think of it this way x86 is implemented in both the 486 and let say the Pentium, under the hood they are different, cache sizes, pipelines, etc. Same goes for the Itanium and Mckinley, the are different implementations of the IA-64 architecture.

Itanium is made for servers and large computers, not for a home user. A 64 bit can increase the amount of ram that the processor can handle. Today's 32 bit cpus can only use up to 4GB ram(2^32), while 64 bit cpus can handle 2^64 ram(around 18 billion GB)

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That is not the only thing going for Itanium, one example would be Predication. One of the things that really slowdown cpus today is dealing with complex branching statements. For example, for a typical IF-THEN-ELSE statement, the IF part first evaluated, and if not satisfied it goes on to the ELSE part. Now, it may seem okay for a single IF-THEN-ELSE, but imagine doing thousands of them, this will really slowdown program execution. What the IA-64 architecture does is just execute both conditions at the same time, then use only the branch we need, which definitely boosts performance as well as avoid penalties for branch misprediction i.e. flushing down the instruction cache, there is more to it than that, but i guess this should suffice ..um, i better stop now.