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hi all,

i was just reading the itanium manuals... and ia-64 is sooooooo cool ;D so i googled for any workstations having an itanium but i saw that most ia-64 workstation comps like hp have dropped production of itanium based cpus. So im asking,
>Does anyone know a company that creates motherboards compatible with itanium?
>Any company that still assembles itanium workstations?
>if *i say if*i buy an itanium computer, will EFI be able to load my old good ia-32 oses (apart from linux for IA64 )

IA64 is a very good idea. It's completely failed. It hasn't reached any level of adoption, making it pretty darn expensive for what it is - and therefore voiding proper adoption. Intel didn't bet on it hard enough to push it through so it's pretty much DOA.

HP is the main source still, they worked with intel on developing it.

killedbydeath wrote: >if *i say if*i buy an itanium computer, will EFI be able to load my old good ia-32 oses (apart from linux for IA64 )

AFAIK, no. Itanium 1 processors had some sort of compatibility mode to ia32 (which was known to be darn slow), but that worked only for userspace application code, definitely not for OS code or even bootstrap (AFAIK, again). With Itanium 2 they gave up on this compatibility unit because it was faster to emulate an ia32-mode in software than the old hardware-unit was. But generally, I'd say an itanium has better things to do than execute ia32-code, if you get me right!

cheers Joe

The main complaint on the IA64 architecture was that programs needed to be recompiled for it or they would run at 386-ish speeds, at the times when the pentium II and III were top-notch. You can reach those speeds running Bochs on it, quite probably, especially since the Bochs operations are highly parallelizable (afaict).

so i'll have to assemble my ia-64 pc from scratch The good thing is that many other comps like nvidia provide ia-64 drivers Btw, i've found only one comp that produces itanium motherboards, supermicro, but does anyone now some other comp that makes itanium motherboards?

you can buy rackmount itanium stuff, its like 10k for a 4u.

its just not cheap at all.

killedbydeath wrote: so i'll have to assemble my ia-64 pc from scratch The good thing is that many other comps like nvidia provide ia-64 drivers Btw, i've found only one comp that produces itanium motherboards, supermicro, but does anyone now some other comp that makes itanium motherboards?

I don't think many companies provide IA-64 drivers. I think you are confusing IA-64 with x64(also known as x86-64). The later being a 64-bit add on to the current x86 architecture, IA-64 is a new(almost dead) architecture.

NVIDIA does provide its closed-source display drivers for IA64, but only for Linux as far as I can see. Don't know whether they provided these for windows xp as well, but AFAIK windows xp for IA64 was discontinued as it seemed that Itanium-cpus didn't go mainstream for desktop machines (and in favor of the so called x64-port).

Don't know if nvidia will provide drivers for windows server IA64, special display drivers are not really an issue there...

cheers Joe

i havent lost hope that ia-64 will eventually make it... i mean the 64 bit extensions are still "extensions" of an old arch. ia64 is something new and clear. Just read about the memory management and protection mechanisms the itanium provide. as i said it's just cool. Anyways, i think intel's mistake was to market it as "server" product. Now it's sinking :-[ :-[ :-[ about my plans for my ia64 pc,
as i said i'm looking desperately for some motherboard with PCI-express expansion slots, supermicro's boards have only PCI-X (extended). Finding a case isn't that difficult, there many cases that are ATX-X.
Anyone knowing some motherboard with pci-express for itanium 2?
???