Replies to post #4924 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[CombJelly]

"They get the credit for Intel's work."

Doubt it. Not really sure when IBM introduced the Power3, but I found a SPEC score from 1998, so it was at lest by then.IBM introduced a 64 bit version of their mainframe in 2000, but it doesn't look as if they had an 64 bit OS for it until 2001. Of course, just because it wasn't released doesn't mean it didn't exist for IBM's people to do the DB2 port to it.

Making DB2 64 bit clean almost certainly happened well before they started work on the Itanium port. Given that about the only simularity between the Opteron and the Itanium is use of 64 bit registers and the ability to address more than 32 bits of memory for a given process, it is highly unlikely that any of Intel's work was leveraged into the Opteron. However, making DB2 64 bit clean for their own products did likely ease the port to Itanium.

Wanna, I know you aren't as dumb as you are pretending here. Get a little dose of reality, why doncha?

[Haddock]

They get the credit for Intel's work. It will not happen that way on future software ports.

I think it's worth considering what will happen on future software ports. It seems clear that the difficult thing is porting to 64 bits, not porting to one specific architecture or another. That indicates to me that if there are significant differences between software availability then it won't be because of the difficulty or otherwise of porting, but rather because of the expected return.

Since AMD64 hardware volumes are likely to be much larger than IA64 hardware volumes that would mean that the only software that would be preferentially available for IA64 would be that that matches the buyer profile of IA64 hardware, in other words very high end, expensive software.