Intel Itanium on a Thinkpad

[xtypestereotype]

Will we ever see the Intel Itanium on a Thinkpad?
There is a low voltage version of the chip available and I think that it would make it the ultimate 64bit machine.
The Pentium 4 with EM64T is not a true 64bit processor and is still based on the aging x86 architecture.
Its funny to think that Windows is compiled to run on a Pentium 1 and because of that we don't really use our new machines to their full capacity...
And in case you need it, the Itanium has a x86 compatibility layer, so it allows you to run x86 code, with the expection of drivers. Drivers are basically the only thing that would have to be rewritten.
IMHO we should move away from this 20yo technology and start fresh...
If we did that, we could be runing a 64bit optimized Windows instead of a Pentium 1 optimized...
Also, IBM would put the ThinkPad on the leading edge of technology and it would make it stand out from the competition even more...
So thats where my question comes in: Would you buy an Itanium based ThinkPad if IBM ever puts one out?

[K. Eng]

There are a number of reasons why it would be a terrible idea to build an Itanium ThinkPad.

(1) Power & Heat - A Deerfield Itanium has a TDP of about 62 watts at 1 GHz. That's three times what a Dothan Pentium M outputs. Battery life would be poor, and the machine would have to be large (Like Dell Inspiron 9100 sized) to accomodate adequate cooling.

(2) Pentium 4 with EM64T IS a true 64-bit processor. It has 64-bit registers and the capability to address more than 4GB of memory.

(3) Compiled to run on an original Pentium? That is not true. Windows XP has SSE and SSE2 optimized codepaths.

(4) 20 year old technology? The instruction set may be 20 years old, but x86-32 and x86-64 processors are often on the bleeding edge of manufacturing process and performance enhancing designs.

No. I would not buy an Itanium based ThinkPad. It would not be faster than a Pentium M ThinkPad, it would have poor battery life, and the software just isn't there for it.

Edit: This thread belongs in Off Topic.

[lfeagan]

We will never see an Itanium in anything like its current implementation on a Thinkpad or any other true notebook for that matter. The power consumption, as mentioned earlier, is high, but not too high to be reasonable. I have a friend with a Dell XPS gaming notebook. It has a Pentium 4 3.4GHz EE CPU that draws around 94 watts. It has an 100Wh battery to power it, but it is somewhat portable. I laugh at him lugging it around, but whatever. To each his own. Certianly if there was some sort of demand for an Itanium portable there would be one. I am certain of that.

EMT is truly 64-bits, but not in the traditionalist view of things certainly. It is an extension and isn't really designed from the ground up to be a 64-bit architecture and so it doesn't take as much advantage of the extra bits available as it could, but whatever.


The x86 compatability layer is a joke. The only good compatability layer I have ever seen in a fully functioning way was FX32! for the DEC Alpha to run native x86 applications under Windows NT 4.0.

Yes, I agree we should move to a new architecturual paradigm for computing. The current model of execution in machines is having some fundamental issues at current.

The VLIW architecture of the Itanium is amazingly powerful at some specialized tasks which are highly parallelizable and have few dependencies between concurrent threads/processes. But it really stinks at the type of work any single user can throw at it unless they do scientific/engineering type of tasks.