Re:Why all the hubbub? (Score 1)

What is so special about the Itanium other than the fact that it's from Intel?

As far as I am aware, the IA-64 is the first instruction set to use explicit parallelism. This removes much work from the CPU when determining which instructions can be executed in parallel. I believe the IA-64 is also extensible--it is extremely easy to add more pipelines or make other significant changes to the architecture without a lot of redesign.

From the article:
An assembly program would call [4 instruction types] nuts. You'd think that Itanium's designers would have been satisfied with 241 different opcodes, but no? An assembly program would call it nuts. You'd think that Itanium's designers would have been satisfied with 241 different opcodes, but no?

The Intel engineer I spoke to about IA-64 said that it would be virtually impossible to write good assembly for IA-64 because humans don't think about explicit parallelism in their heads very well. Itanium/IA-64 relies heavily on good compilers.