According to an article in tomorrow’s New York Times, Intel’s Itanium 2 chip may not be as sure a bet as it looked even a few months ago. The 64-bit Itanium 2 boasts more than 200 million transistors and is designed to deliver top performance.
The chip is four years behind schedule and businesses aren’t spending money on technology. Most damning is a quote from Gordon Bell: “Every big computing disaster has come from taking too many ideas and putting them in one place, and the Itanium is exactly that.”
The trend in computing, some observers argue, is the model envisioned by Danny Hillis and others decades ago. A whole bunch of cheap computers tied together is more powerful and useful than a single behemoth.
According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the main problem is power. Not power in the sense of raw computing power (although that’s a problem too; the first Itanium was slower than a 32-bit Pentium), but rather electricity consumption. “Data centers can consume as much electricity as a city.” Each Itanium chip uses 130 watts of electricity.
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