What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2037

IA-64 canned and were apparently moved onto a next-gen x86 project. A bunch of engineers were moved from HP to Intel to do a replacement project, that has taken (at least) a 25% hit in clock rate. I also think that it's running very late too. We'll see how it pans out when they release it, but that kind of news is a fairly reliable indicator that the design is in deep poo. I think it's a pretty safe bet that IBM's POWER5 core will shred it in every department, the POWER6 is not far away either.

chip too, which also bodes ill. Of all the IA-64 systems vendors SGI was the most committed (HP still flogs Alpha, PA-RISC and lots of x86 hardware). Recent news indicates that SGI is working on a x86 version of their bread-winning system, the Altix. The person for the IA-64 is that it shows no signs of competing for the speed crown, while the x86 chips are already as good if not better in the majority of mainstream applications (including high-end apps). The area where the IA-64 shines is in DSP style FP, but the problem there is that widgets like the BlueGene-L eat it alive in terms of scalability and FLOPS-W.

In essence, IA-64 is in between a rock and a hard place.

Cheers, Rupert