The Itanic Saga

After three years of delays, Merced shipped as Itanium on the 29th of May in 2001. The first OEM systems from HP, IBM, and Dell were shipped in June. Itanium, whose architecture was now referred to as IA-64, was a 6-wide VLIW chip running at either 733 to 800 MHz with a 266 MT/s front side bus. It had 16K of L1 cache, 96K of L2 cache, 2 or 4 MB of L3 cache, and it was a single core chip on socket PAC418 built on a 180nm process. That this chip under performed is an understatement. Given the long development time, multi-billion-dollar development cost, significant hype, and claims that it would out-compete everything on the market... Itanium was a massive failure. The 32 bit x86 chips of the time were able to best it in most workloads. Embarrassingly, the Pentium 4 (whose own performance wasn't that good) beat Itanium on integer performance and memory bandwidth. Those areas where the chip was strong were in transaction processing and scientific applications. John Crawford, Merced project leader at Intel, reflects: Everything was crazy. We were taking risks everywhere. Everything was new. When you do that, you're going to stumble." The five hundred person team working on the chip was also relatively inexperienced, and disagreements between HP and Intel led to many compromises in design.

Bradford Morgan White

Itanium is the future. This entire article is anti-Itanium propaganda and misinformation. Do your own research.