HP's Mosberger touts Linux for Itanic

A PDF circulating amongst those HP partners that Carly's Thought Police have failed to stamp out, has senior research scientist David Mosberger going ecstatic over the performance of IA-64 Linux on the company's boxes.

Mosberger, pictured here with his little penguin pal, says in the document we've seen that the Itanium was co-developed by both Intel and HP, an old canard that the latter company is still peddling, despite the efforts of Chipzilla to say Princess Carly's firm has to go it alone these days.

What this and other documents we've seen underlines is that HP is getting very, very serious about Linux, especially in the face of what it perceives as a Big Blue threat to its New Age P Low Cost Model (LCM).

Mosberger claims that Itanium 2 is only the start of an "aggressive line up" of pin compatible CPUs planned by Chipzilla, including fat-cache Madison at 130 nanometers, faster "cost optimised" Deerfield at 130 nanometers, and the 90 nanometer Montecito which is down the line a td.

On the HP ZX 6000, avers Mosberger, the Itanic 2 delivers 1356 SPECfp2000 using Linux, 807 SPECint2000 on HP/UX and that the ZX 2000 is the "lowest cost workstation with over 1000 SPECfp2000" scores.

He claims that IA64 Linux will run "huge apps" up to four petabytes, and runs "most" existing IA32 applications including Realplayer, Acroread, Netscape and "even some Windows apps", via WINE.

The "vast majority" of programs written in C, C++ and Fortran just need a recompile, while he also claims that Java has no portability problems. Native JVMS support will be coming soon, he said.

But assembler programs need to be rewritten to use the IA64 architecture, he concedes.

IA64 Linux won't support the ILP32 data model for IA64 code, and this forces native applications to be "64-bit clean", he says, while increased data sizes "sometimes causes (small) performance degradation".

But native apps can take advantage of the 64-bit architecture and his compelling argument as to the advantages of using this is that it "avoids market fragmentation". Obviously a problem for HP, but customers may not see it the same way.

He said that the gcc compiler is not high performance but is very stable, while Intel compilers "yield very good code but less proven and not open source". Despite that drawback, it is better in most other aspects, he reckons.

Writing IA64 assembler can be very rewarding, he says, but you're going to have to spend some time learning the architecture. We'd say that was something of an understatement.

Err... that's it, more or less. µ