Intel's RISC-y Business 225
Esther Schindler writes "With the Xeon 7600 line, Intel is finally using the 'R' word: RISC. With the new chips, Intel is targeting the mission-critical market dominated by Sun SPARC and IBM Power, a first. Can the Xeon E7 processor deliver Intel's final blow to the RISC market, which includes its own Itanium? 'With the launch of the E7 earlier this year, it seemed Intel was finally ready to make its final push, calling out RISC by name. "The days of IT organizations being forced to deploy expensive, closed RISC architectures for mission-critical applications are nearing an end," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, in a statement announcing the E7 line. Bold words.' Andy Patrizio interviews several experts; what do you think?"
Itaniums is **NOT** RISC (Score:2, Interesting)
Just have to point out, Itanium is absolutely NOT RISC in any sense of the word. Other than that, it is rather unfortunate that Intel has the most money to develop new processes (i.e. die shrinks), because the actual Intel instruction set is quite inelegant, both from a programmer standpoint, and from the standpoint of implementing it in silicon. I can't argue with overall performance, if Intel tops performance than that is that; but, the fact of the matter is that any of these RISC designs (Power, Sparc, the PA-RISC, Alpha, ARM...) would clean Intel's clock if they had access to the type of processes Intel does.
Re:finally??? (Score:0, Interesting)
... closed RISC architectures ???
What the effing bull crap is that? RISC is an open standard. I am reminded of the "dim wits at the top of the Corps" /. article from a few days ago.