"Nathan J. Williams" <nathanw@wasabisystems.com> writes:

> GCC is not up to the task, but even Intel and HP's commercial
> compilers for IA64, while better, do not deliver the theoretical
> performance of the system.

But from a FP perspective it's far from bad. See f.i
http://www.pdc.kth.se/~ulfa/PDC_TRITA_2002_1.pdf, which compares one
specific benchmark on Itanium 2, POWER4, and relatively modern PC:s,
as well as some older hardware. Opteron results are not included for
obvious reasons.

I think Itanium will be able to compete quite nicely in the same niche
as IBM, Sun, and SGI, but since Intel will make little money from
support (which I suppose is where the cash is), the question is if
they can make enough money on it to continue development. For larger
volume they will need a desktop CPU, but that is probably far in the
future (that is more than 6 months :-).

/Johan