[svlug] Itanium Conference / Expo

[Joe Buck]

On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 03:01:30PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Gelato ICE is dedicated specifically to Linux(r) on the Itanium
> architecture and is sponsored by HP, Intel, and the Itanium(r) Solutions
> Alliance. Presentation topics will cover: optimization, multi-core
> programming, virtualization, compilers, and cutting-edge research.

The Itanium project has been, I'm sure, disappointing to its financial
backers.  I don't think the architecture has much of a future.

However, I must acknowledge and thank the Itanium folks for their massive
contributions to free software; a hell of a lot of GCC hackers have
managed to support themselves some years on "Itanic money", a number of
other free software projects including the Linux kernel got funding as
well, and the very nice cross-platform C++ ABI that gcc and Intel's icc
both have used since the gcc 3.0 days was put together out of the ia64
project.  Compiler work particularly benefitted because it's such a
bitch to get high-quality code on the Itanium architecture, and Intel
threw a lot of money at a lot of researchers in academia to help fix that.
They have their own proprietary compiler, but knew the architecture would
be a flop without decent gcc support, so they funded that.