blauboad, maybe you are right and the concept of an industry-wide TPI is not realistic. Intel will just have to figure out a way to explain to their customers why their slowest processor (Itanium) is really their fastest processor, and why their mid-speed processor (Pentium-M) is going to replace their high-speed processor (P4). I guess they will make the argument on artificial benchmarks, which few people understand at all.
In order for a TPI to be established, each company has to get something from it. IBM has to be part of it, as you reminded me. Right now PPC is the laggard among all the processors so IBM is probably disinclined to participate until they have a version which can compete.
Related note: Given that PPC is the choice for XBox2, perhaps we will see Windows PPC machines from the major vendors at some point. IBM must realize that Apple's niche shrinks each year. All the architectures (Itanium, Power and AMD64) are converging on flat 64-bit addressing. I suspect it would be relatively easy to port Windows-AMD64 to PPC, it doesn't need all the stupid compiler tricks of Itanium. I think PPC is big-endian, but mips showed that you can make a processor which can be run in either mode, so this is fixable in hardware.
Aha - they did this already:
The POWER memory model was big-endian. The final addition to the PowerPC memory model was to support both big-endian and little-endian memory models. A mode, controlled by software, specifies whether the current memory semantics are big-endian or little-endian. This permits the use of PowerPC processors in systems designed to run big-endian applications, little-endian applications, or both.
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