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A historical note: Windows XP 64-bit Edition that was mentioned in the article, was Itanium-specific. It was based on XP kernel while Windows XP x64 Edition (fo
by sedatk 2mo ago
A historical note: Windows XP 64-bit Edition that was mentioned in the article, was Itanium-specific. It was based on XP kernel while Windows XP x64 Edition (for AMD64 architecture) was based on Windows Server 2003 kernel. Because of that, Windows XP x64 Edition had some significantly different performance characteristics compared to other Windows XP editions. If anything, it was closer to Vista than XP in some aspects.
- twoodfin 2mo agoI would love to read the Microsoft PM spec for this product. Who in the world were they making it for? Itanium never made it into the consumer-class hardware that was XP’s audience. AFAIK, Intel never even published a roadmap for that to happen! Maybe a proof of concept they shipped as a demonstration of loyalty to Intel?!
- mrpippy 2mo agoThere were Itanium workstations (https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_i2000.html https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_i2000.html, https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_zx2000.html https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_zx2000.html), but of course these quickly crashed and burned with the rest of Itanium
- twoodfin 2mo agoYeah, I had forgotten that by the Windows XP/Server 2003 era, the latter was definitely a server product, with XP targeting the workstation world. That still seems weird to me. If I had to rely on a PC for high-end work in that period, I wanted the server SKU.
- pjmlp 2mo agoBetween 2000 and 2003, I used Windows Server as desktop at work, after a short period of dual booting between Windows 2000 and Red-Hat Linux, which I stop doing when routinely rebooting into Windows for support started being a frequent habit. Thus I fully switched to Windows Server to be able to check the same issues as the customers had, and since we only supported big iron UNIX during those years, I would anyway use telnet / X Windows to connect to those machines.
- walrus01 2mo agoIn approx. 2000 to 2002, 2003 or around then, there was a theoretical dream that Itanium based workstations would become a real mass market thing, but it obviously never caught on. Intel never made Itanium CPUs cheap enough to realistically purchase and Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers (the same companies that were making really nice boards for the 1 GHz to 1.2 GHz socketed Pentium 3 with 512KB cache and the first generations of Pentium 4). Also the performance sucked. This was before AMD64 existed on the corporate desktop or home desktop.
- pjmlp 2mo agoHad AMD not come out with AMD64, and Itanium would eventually prevail, as there was no other alternative coming from Intel.
- chrchr 2mo agoI vividly remember the months after AMD64 came out when tech companies were dumping their specialty RISC server hardware (mostly Sun, but some other stuff too) and replacing them with commodity AMD boxes. It was felt like a monumental shift.
- saati 2mo agoIt wouldn't, performance was horrible.
- pjmlp 2mo agoYes it would, when the only way is to press forward, eventually something has to improve.
- acdha 2mo agoYeah, that was real soon now in the mid-90s – I remember reading Byte in high school and they’d be talking about how Alpha, MIPS, etc. workstations were doomed and then it kept getting pushed back – maybe 98/99, early in the next century, … and then AMD launched x86-64 and everyone just stopped pretending Itanium was ever going to happen.
- ghaff 2mo agoIt's pretty simple. There was a point in the early 2000s (especially pre-AMD x64) when it was pretty broadly assumed that Itanium from Intel was going to inevitably win given that a 64-bit transition was inevitable (correct) and that it would happen on Intel's terms (incorrect).
- sidewndr46 2mo agoI believe efforts like this were funded by HP. It is why the Itanium was kept around for so long despite being dead on arrival.
- protocolture 2mo agoWatching my mate explain to his father for the 100th time that the game wont run on his 64 bit Itanium workstation despite it running windows did eventually get old.
- nticompass 2mo agoI ran Windows XP x64 Edition on a computer for a while and some software didn't like it. Since it was technically NT 5.2 (Server 2003) and not NT 5.1 (XP), some programs/installers would complain that it wasn't compatible. So, it was cool to have a 64-bit Windows XP, it was annoying to get stuff to run on it.