Re: register allocation vs. scheduling and other stuff

[tm <tm at mail dot kloo dot net>]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Robert Dewar wrote:

> are you really sure that only 5000 Itanium machines shipped. I knew the
> number was low, but I am surprised it was that low.

Few more:

http://www.itworld.com/Comp/4211/IDG020104itanium/index.html

"During the third quarter of 2001, hardware vendors sold a grand total of
 1,135 workstations, with HP accounting for 650 (57 percent) of those 
 units, according to Kara Yokley, workstation research analyst at
 International Data Corp. (IDC), in Framingham, Massachusetts. IBM
 Corp. sold 385 workstations and Dell Computer Corp. and Silicon Graphics
 Inc. each shipped 50.

 Overall, hardware companies shipped 346,846 workstations in the third
 quarter, according to recent numbers from Dataquest Inc., a unit of
 Gartner Inc.

 What makes the lackluster sales even more disheartening is that the two
 companies banking on the future of Itanium -- Intel and Microsoft
 Corp. -- may have purchased as much as 80 percent of the workstations
 sold in the third quarter, Yokley said.

 "Intel and Microsoft are the No. 1 buyers of Itanium to date," she
 said. "They are pretty much the two major customers for Itanium."

 Only "a handful" of customers bought the remaining Itanium servers not
 scooped up by Intel and Microsoft, said Gartner Dataquest workstation
 analyst Pia Rieppo."
...
 HP had urged customers to begin testing first-generation servers now and
 make large purchases when McKinley comes out. As it turns out, most users
 may begin testing Itanium with the McKinley generation of chips and not
 make large purchases until Madison arrives, analysts said."


I found other articles which mentioned the 2002 sales of Itanium 1/2 chips
seems to be around 8000, and they're "projecting" 50,000 for 2003.

But personally, I think analysts are usually overly optimistic - I was in
the games industry in 1997, and the analysts projected online games would
be a $4 billion dollar industry by 2002, and all the game companies rushed
to build their own online gaming networks...it was actually about $138
million in 2002.

Toshi