Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

Tip of the day: Itanium is not “industry standard”

Sorry, but I get frustrated by lack of attention to details… this isn’t even a detail – it’s a huge mistake to say Itanium is “industry standard”. Sure, Intel and x86 are commonly referred to as “industry standard” architectures b/c the x86 architecture is pretty much a standard (and there’s choice – AMD). x86, however, is an instruction set architecture and everything Intel makes is not an industry standard…

Itanium originally was supposed to support x86 instructions, but that feature fell off with all the other Itanium planned features that never made it to market. So now, Itanium only allows the use of the EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) instruction set and guess what – it’s not even close to x86 and so applications need rewritten, recompiled, etc (and it’s not simple).

So please, do not refer to Itanium as “industry standard” – it makes no sense, and to those who know, you’ll appear foolish.

BTW, Itanium is not selling well either… you could say this “industry standard” is not so standard simply on volumes… forecasts missed actuals by a margin…