Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-)

Robert Myers <rmyers1400 DeleteThis @comcast.net> wrote:
 > I made a post to comp.arch about this book with the subject line
 > "Stupefying hubris from Intel/HP about Itanium" to comp.arch on March
 > 1, 2003. Del Cecchi had previously pointed out the existence of the
 > book on October 2, 2002, but it's not clear that anyone but me read
 > (well at least skimmed) it. In any case, I was the only one to say
 > anything subtantive about the book's contents. If I weren't so
 > interested in self-description (what people and companies say about
 > themselves and why), I would have been tremendously annoyed at the
 > book.

Okay, then maybe R. Myers might not like this book.

Yousuf Khan<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

Yousuf Khan wrote:
 > Robert Myers <rmyers1400.DeleteThis@comcast.net> wrote:
 >
  >> ... If I weren't so
  >>interested in self-description (what people and companies say about
  >>themselves and why), I would have been tremendously annoyed at the
  >>book.
 >
 >
 > Okay, then maybe R. Myers might not like this book.
 >

But I am intensely interested in self-description, I'm interested in
what makes grand technical initiatives succeed or fail, and I think it's
more interesting to say what you think is going on before all the horses
have crossed the finish line than it is to be a smug historian. .

Like the book or not like is more or less beside the point. I was
stunned that Intel/HP let such a daringly unrepentant bit of
self-promotion see daylight in view of the disappointing performance of
Itanium, but even that (fairly reasonable, I think) reaction is a
distraction. The fact is that the book _was_ published, and without
corporate gloss or apologia, as far as I know: just, here it is, the
most wonderful processor ever, just as we said it would be.

Leave out the technical issues. If Intel/HP have to climb down from the
fortress they've built around Itanium, how will they ever pull it off?
It would be like IBM admitting that maybe System 360 wasn't such a great
idea, after all (which, who knows, maybe it wasn't).

RM<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 16:29:29 GMT, Robert Myers <rmyers1400 DeleteThis @comcast.net>
wrote:

 >Leave out the technical issues. If Intel/HP have to climb down from the
 >fortress they've built around Itanium, how will they ever pull it off?
 >It would be like IBM admitting that maybe System 360 wasn't such a great
 >idea, after all (which, who knows, maybe it wasn't).

Wasn't it "Stretch" which wasn't a good idea... preceding S/360. I guess
there was a lot of folklore back then too.

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

Robert Myers <rmyers1400.TakeThisOut@comcast.net> wrote:
 > Leave out the technical issues. If Intel/HP have to climb down from the
 > fortress they've built around Itanium, how will they ever pull it off?
 > It would be like IBM admitting that maybe System 360 wasn't such a great
 > idea, after all (which, who knows, maybe it wasn't).

Whatever one thinks about the technical merits of S/360,
the commercial success was undeniable. The same could be
said of x86.

I very much doubt that IA64 (Itanium) will ever enjoy such
commercial success. It's more likely to go down that path
heavily travelled by Intel after 432 and i860.

-- Robert<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

George Macdonald wrote:

 > On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 16:29:29 GMT, Robert Myers <rmyers1400 DeleteThis @comcast.net>
 > wrote:
 >
 >
  >>Leave out the technical issues. If Intel/HP have to climb down from the
  >>fortress they've built around Itanium, how will they ever pull it off?
  >>It would be like IBM admitting that maybe System 360 wasn't such a great
  >>idea, after all (which, who knows, maybe it wasn't).
 >
 >
 > Wasn't it "Stretch" which wasn't a good idea... preceding S/360. I guess
 > there was a lot of folklore back then too.
 >

Stretch just precedes my actually becoming conscious of computers in any
but the most theoretical of ways, so I know only the written record--no
folklore. Branch prediction, speculation, out of order execution,
hardware prefetch, and fused FMAC: less than two hundred thousand
transistors. What's not to like? .

RM<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

Robert Redelmeier wrote:

 >
 > Whatever one thinks about the technical merits of S/360,
 > the commercial success was undeniable. The same could be
 > said of x86.
 >
 > I very much doubt that IA64 (Itanium) will ever enjoy such
 > commercial success. It's more likely to go down that path
 > heavily travelled by Intel after 432 and i860.
 >

You may be right. I'm just having a really hard time imagining how this
is going to go down. Intel's goal is to 360-ize as much enterprise code
as it can (only for IA64, obviously). How well they are doing that, how
well they can do that, is something that I just cannot judge, although
it is apparent things are not going according to plan at the moment.

George Macdonald said something about his own experience with Alpha (and
by extension, with Itanium) that sounded absolutely pivotal: software
developers don't want to develop for a platform that isn't going to make
them money.

That's easy, you're thinking: pass on Itanium. Not so fast, buckaroo.
One future: x86-64=Open source, low rent, lots of volume, no margin.
Itanium=Proprietary, expensive, low volume, high margin. If you look at
the Intel branding ads aimed at corporate decision-makers, Xeon is
"productivity" and Itanium is "enterprise." Who wants to be
"productivity" when one could be "enterprise?" Especially if the "who"
is a manager, to whom "productivity" is something that is delivered by
nameless underlings. .

They'll never get away with it, you're sputtering, and you may be right,
but Intel shows no signs of abandoning its strategy.

RM<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

Robert Restampedesswrote:

 > Robert Myers <rmyers1400.RemoveThis@comcast.net> wrote:
  >> Leave out the technical issues. If Intel/HP have to climb down
  >> from the fortress they've built around Itanium, how will they
  >> ever pull it off? It would be like IBM admitting that maybe
  >> System 360 wasn't such a great idea, after all (which, who knows,
  >> maybe it wasn't).
 >
 > Whatever one thinks about the technical merits of S/360,
 > the commercial success was undeniable. The same could be
 > said of x86.
 >

Undeniable, indeed. That's *MY* basis for supporting K8.

IBM tried to kill S/360 with 'FS', just as Intel has tried to kill
x86 with Itanic. Both companies did it for internal reasons,
totally disregarding customer's wishes. "Amazingly", neither went
over well with the customer set. Both 3x0 and x86 are still with
us (after forty and twenty years, respectively). ...evolution over
revolution.

 > I very much doubt that IA64 (Itanium) will ever enjoy such
 > commercial success. It's more likely to go down that path
 > heavily travelled by Intel after 432 and i860.

....as AMD64 stampedes the mess Intel's tried to create. History
does repeat. Those who try to harness history will make money.
Those who try to harness their customers deserve an ugly death.

--
Keith<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 18:19:39 GMT, Robert Redelmeier <redelm.DeleteThis@ev1.net.invalid>
wrote:

 >Robert Myers <rmyers1400.DeleteThis@comcast.net> wrote:
  >> Leave out the technical issues. If Intel/HP have to climb down from the
  >> fortress they've built around Itanium, how will they ever pull it off?
  >> It would be like IBM admitting that maybe System 360 wasn't such a great
  >> idea, after all (which, who knows, maybe it wasn't).
 >
 >Whatever one thinks about the technical merits of S/360,
 >the commercial success was undeniable.

I think the technical merits were right up there as well.
What other system had a control store that required an air-pump to operate?

/daytripper<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

In article <rfp3d0livl7lj5st0v2cj8bdho9u3aoejm.TakeThisOut@4ax.com>,
  George Macdonald <fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> writes:
<snip>
 > As for JCL, I once had a JCL evangelist explain to me how he could use JCL
 > in ways which wasn't possible on systems with simpler control statements -
 > conditional job steps, subsitution of actual file names for dummy
 > parameters etc... "catalogued procedures"?[hazy again] The guy was stuck
 > in his niche of "job steps" where data used to be massaged from one set of
 > tapes to another and then on in another step to be remassaged into some
 > other record format for storing on another set of tape... all those steps
 > being necessary, essentially because of the sequential tape storage. We'd
 > had disks for a while but all they did was emulate what they used to do
 > with tapes - he just didn't get it.
 >
I used to do JCL, back when I ran jobs on MVS. After getting used to it,
and the fact that you allocated or deleted files using the infamous
IEFBR14, there were things to recommend it. At the very least, you edited
your JCL, and it all stayed put. Then you submitted, and it was in the
hands of the gods. None (or very little, because there were ways to kill
a running job) of this Oops! and hit Ctrl-C.

I never had to deal with tapes, fortunately. It was also frustrating not
having dynamic filenames. There were ways to weasel around some of those
restrictions, though.

Dale Pontius<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

In article <9ji1d0htgdbqorgc3rkqbanrvm952l62sl.RemoveThis@4ax.com>,
  daytripper <day_trippr.RemoveThis@REMOVEyahoo.com> writes:
 > On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 18:19:39 GMT, Robert Redelmeier <redelm.RemoveThis@ev1.net.invalid>
 > wrote:
 >
  >>Robert Myers <rmyers1400.RemoveThis@comcast.net> wrote:
   >>> Leave out the technical issues. If Intel/HP have to climb down from the
   >>> fortress they've built around Itanium, how will they ever pull it off?
   >>> It would be like IBM admitting that maybe System 360 wasn't such a great
   >>> idea, after all (which, who knows, maybe it wasn't).
  >>
  >>Whatever one thinks about the technical merits of S/360,
  >>the commercial success was undeniable.
 >
 > I think the technical merits were right up there as well.
 > What other system had a control store that required an air-pump to operate?
 >
When a former boss had a service anniversay, they brought him a 'gift'.
It was one of those thingies that needed an air pump to operate, also
known as CCROS. I suspect it meant Capacitive-Coupled Read-Only Storage.
The slick thing was that it was a ROM you could progam with a keypunch.
Not very dense, though. 36KB in 2 or 3 cubic feet.

Dale Pontius<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

In article <xE6Ac.117708$Ly.58729@attbi_s01>,
  Robert Myers <rmyers1400 RemoveThis @comcast.net> writes:
 > Robert Redelmeier wrote:
 >
  >>
  >> x86/WinNT (maybe Linux) holds that position now. What compelling
  >> argument is available for IA64? What performance? 64 bits is
  >> available ~painlessly with x86-64.
  >>
 >
 > The technical merits may not be all that important one way or the other.
 > If enough software developers feel they can forego Itanium, Itanium
 > will die. If a software developer decides to forgo Itanium and loses
 > enough important clients in the enterprise space because of it, the
 > software developer may be shut out of the most lucrative part of the market.
 >
One simple question about IA64...

What and whose problem does it solve?

As far as I can tell, its prime mission is to solve Intel's problem, and
rid it of those pesky cloners from at least some segments of the CPU
marketplace, hopefully an expanding portion.

It has little to do with customers' problems, in fact it makes some
problems for customers. (Replace ALL software? Why is this good for
ME?)

People often make much of making technical merit subservient to
marketing considerations. IMHO as long as the proposed solution is
'good enough' and helps customers solve their problems, that's true.
The IA64 has thus far not been 'good enough' in that it did well in some
specialized benchmarks and applications, but was not 'nutritionally
complete' for anything other than a few scientific missions. It is just
possible that X86-64 has closed the window of opportunity on IA64,
simply because of the software replacement issue. It's a heck of a lot
easier to step into X86-64 from the software perspective. It solves
customers' migration problems better.

The question for IA64 becomes can it bring enough to the table on future
revisions to make up for its obstacles. Will >8-way become compelling,
and a what price? At this point, AMD is trying to push its Opteron ASPs
up, but probably has more flex room than IA64 or Xeon.

Dale Pontius<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

In article <T92Cc.71530$2i5.7652@attbi_s52>,
  Robert Myers <rmyers1400 DeleteThis @comcast.net> writes:
 > Dale Pontius wrote:
 >
 > <snip>
 >
  >>
  >> The question for IA64 becomes can it bring enough to the table on future
  >> revisions to make up for its obstacles. Will >8-way become compelling,
  >> and a what price? At this point, AMD is trying to push its Opteron ASPs
  >> up, but probably has more flex room than IA64 or Xeon.
  >>
 >
 > At this point, Itanium is _still_ mostly expectation. My point in
 > commenting on the book that started the thread is that Intel seemed to
 > have no interest in lowering expectations about Itanium.
 >
 > Intel will do _something_ to diminish the handicap that Itanium
 > currently has due to in-order execution. The least painful thing that
 > Intel can do, as far as I understand things, is to use speculative
 > slices as a prefetch mechanism. That gets a big piece of the advantages
 > of OoO without changing the main thread control logic at all. Whether
 > that strategy works at an acceptable cost in transistors and power is
 > another question.
 >
 > That single change could rewrite the rules for Itanium, because it will
 > take much of the heat off compilation and allow people more frequently
 > actually to see the kind of performance that Itanium now seems to
 > produce mostly only in benchmarks.
 >
Development cost is a different thing to Intel than to most of the rest
of us. I've heard of "Intellian Hordes," (my perversion of Mongolian)
and that it sounds tough to me to coordinate the sheer number of people
they have working on a project. I contrast that with the small team we
have on projects, and our perpetual fervent wish for just a few more
people.

 > As to cost, Intel have made it clear that they are prepared to do
 > whatever they have to do to make the chip competitive.
 >
 > As to how the big (more than 8-way) boxes behave, that's up to the
 > people who build the big boxes, isn't it? The future big boxes will
 > depend on board level interconnect and switching infrastructure, and if
 > anybody knows what that is going to look like in Intel's PCI Express
 > universe, I wish they'd tell me.
 >
Actually, it's none of my business, except as an interested observer. I
don't ever forsee that kind of hardware in my home, and I don't oversee
purchases of that kind of equipment.

 > It gets harder to stick with the position all the time, but you still
 > have to take a deep breath when betting against Intel. The message
 > Intel wants you to hear is: IA-64 for mission critical big stuff, IA-32
 > for not-so-critical, not-so-big stuff.
 >
My one stake in the IA-64 vs X86-64/IA-32e debate is that I have some
wish to run EDA software on my home machine. I like to have dinner with
the family, and it's about a half-hour each way to/from work. Having
EDA on Linux at home means I can do O.T. after dinner without a drive.

I currently have IA-32 and run EDA software, but that stuff is moving to
64-bit. I can foresee having X86-64 in my own home in the near future,
which keeps me capable. I can't see the horizon where I'll have IA-64
in my home, at the moment. In addition to EDA software, my IA-32
machine also does Internet stuff, plays Quake3, and other clearly non-
work related things. Actually, the work is the extra mission.

 > No marketing baloney for you and you don't care what Intel wants you to
 > hear? That's reasonable and to be expected from technical people.
 > Itanium is where they intend to put their resources and support for high
 > end applications, and they apparently have no intention of backing away
 > from that. Feel free to ignore what they're spending so much money to
 > tell you. It's your nickel.
 >
Marketing baloney or not, it's really irrelevant at the moment. I'm a
home user, and Intel's roadmap doesn't put IA-64 in front of me for the
visible horizon. Nor do I have anything to say about purchasing that
calibre of machines at work. I *have* expressed my preference about
seeing EDA software on X86-64 - for the purpose of running it on a home
machine. So not only is it my nickel, they're not even asking me for
it. Any ruminations about IA-64 vs X86-64 are merely that - technical
discussion and ruminations. Anything they're spending money telling me
now is simply cheerleading.

For that matter, since IA-64 isn't on the Intel roadmap for home users
yet, I could well buy an X86-64 machine in the next year or two. When
it's time to step up again, I can STILL examine the IA-64 decision vs
whatever else is on the market, then.

Put simply, at the moment my choices are IA-32, X86-64, and Mac.
Period. Any discussion of IA-64 is just that -discussion, *because* I'm
a technical person.

Dale Pontius<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-) 

In article <hJKdnXalDN7JFEbdRVn-jA DeleteThis @adelphia.com>,
  K Williams <krw DeleteThis @att.biz> writes:
 > Robert Myers wrote:
 >
<snip>
  >> In the aftermath of Apollo, though, with
  >> shrinking budgets and a chronic need to oversell, NASA delivered a
  >> Shuttle program
  >> that many see as poorly conceived and executed. Intel and Itanium
  >> are still in the Apollo era in terms of resources.
 >
 > No IMHO, Intel missed the moon and the Shuttle, and went directly
 > to the politics of the International Space Station. ...A mission
 > without a requirement.
 >
Every now and then, I have to pop up and defend the ISS.

I must agree that at the moment, the ISS has practically NO value to
science. But I must disagree that it has NO value, at all.

At one point it had, and perhaps may have again, value in diplomacy
and fostering international cooperation.

But IMHO the real value of the ISS is not as a SCIENCE experiment, but
as an ENGINEERING experiment. The fact that we're having such a tough
time with it indicates that it is a HARD problem. It's clearly a third
generation space station. The first generation was preassembled, like
Skylab and Salyut, perhaps with a little unfurling and maybe a gizmo or
two docked, but primarly ground-assembled, and sent up. The second
generation was Mir, with a bunch of ground-assembled pieces sent up and
docked. There's some on-orbit assembly, but it's still largely a thing
of the ground.

The ISS has modules all built on the ground, obviously. But the on-
orbit assembly is well beyond that of Mir. It's the next step of a
logical progression.

Some look and say it's hard, let's stop. I say that until we solve the
'minor' problems of the ISS, we're NEVER going to get to anything like
Von Braun's (or 2001: ASO) wheels. Zubrin's proposal, in order to avoid
requiring an expensive space station, went to the extreme of having
nothing to do with one, even if it already were to exist. But until we
get to some sort of on-orbit, or at least off-Earth assembly capability
we're going to be limited to something in the 30ft-or-less diameter
that practically everything we've ever sent up has had.

Oh, the ISS orbit is another terrible obstacle. But at the moment, it
clearly permits Russian launches, and would be in even worse trouble,
without.

But IMHO, the ENGINEERING we're learning, however reluctantly and
slowly, is ESSENTIAL to future steps in space.

Dale Pontius<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Might be a book that even R. Myers can love :-)