Talk:Itanium/Archive 1

message: I've removed the link regarding Microsoft and Itanium for three reasons:
* It is unclear is Microsoft ever intended to support anything else than it's server versions of Windows on Itanium.
* This is more related to IA-64 and Itanium 2. Itanium processors are no longer on the market (see Intel's website)
* Traditionally Microsoft has little market share in the high-end server market (the market the Itanium was targeted at)
Moreover, if someone decides it should be added back. Please cite the real source http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/windowsserver/bulletins/longhorn/itanium_bulletin.mspx and not just some Inquirer article (The Inquirer in not know to be one of most reliable news sources, although it's very good at rumors).
-- Koffieyahoo 14:59, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  End of Itanium? 

message: Why are some Wikipedians so bent on removing the criticism section? Even after references were added, some seem determined to make sure the article only contains positive notes about the processor. —Joseph/N328KF (Talk) 05:44, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Repeated deletion/whitewashing of Criticism section 

message: As if the edit war by User_talk:65.102.172.33 on the Opteron and Itanium pages wasn't bad enough, a simple google search found that his recent contribution of "info on architecture" was copied from this Anandtech article. The stupid idiot didn't even put in proper images, just left them using Example.jpg. Imroy 07:18, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There was no need to use the :Template:Copyvio tag. You only use that when all text is suspect. In this case, just revert to the last legal version. —Joseph/N328KF (Talk) 12:43, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't add the copyvio template, that was Peyna. Imroy 04:05, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, that was me.  Didn't realize there was a non-copyvio version available. Peyna 04:09, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyright violation 

message: Copernicus, I was in the middle of the edit when you so eagerly reverted it resulting in merge error. I fully intended to add proper citation, credit, and linkage as well as correct the example image.
:I don't care how much citation or credit you add, that's still a copyright violation. I suggest you read the copyright section of the contributing FAQ. Unless you can get the original author to relicense the work to be compatable with the GNU FDL, or the public domain, then it cannot be added to Wikipedia. Simple as that. Imroy 07:32, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Note that this is an article about the Itanium processor. Just as there is another page for Itanium 2. There's already a good and detailed right-up of the architecture at IA-64. Imroy 07:45, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point. The Itanium clearly failed as a product, due to technical reasons I've now put back in the text. Any arguments about the future of IA-64 should be taken to the Itanium2 page. Timharwoodx 14:15, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Response to Copyright violation 

message: Microsoft has ported Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 to Itanium. Microsoft server applications include SQL Server, Operations Manager, CRM Server, IIS, Visual Studio, and the .NET Framework. The decision was made in recent years to not include support for client applications or client operating systems (such as Windows XP) for the Itanium, because the market demand is too small to justify the porting and support costs.
I wasn't aware MS ported XP to Itanium.  Was some or all of it ported, but never shipped?
:MSTCrow 15:45, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  XP Porting 

message: "Importantly, it was expected that AMD would be unable to clone it."
Firstly this is a speculation.
If its not a speculation but a fact, it should be written in present tense:
"Importantly, it is expected that AMD will be unable to clone it."
and lastly I don't think that this sentence is important. This is an article about Itanium, not a gossip website discussing intellectual abilities of AMD.
:Then, remove it. —BorgHunter ubx (talk) 21:52, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: AMD didn't want to clone it. Their 64-bit server strategy all along was to develop x86-64, which came to fruition as the Opteron. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 74.245.91.25 (talk) 15:18, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  unnecessary sentence? 

message: Is this page supposed to be about the entire Itanium family, or just the first (Merced) processor in that family? Guy Harris 00:51, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Entire Itanium family, or just the first processor? 

message: Is Intergraph v. Intel worth mentioning in the articles? Alex 17:02, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intergraph v. Intel 

message: How do these processor lines compare?  Now than Xeon is 64 bit, is Itanium being phased out?
--68.103.154.140 21:12, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Itanium vs Xeon 

message: Unless someone objects, I will move this article to Itanium processor and then add a replacement Itanium article to discuss the Itanium family as a whole. When this article started, it was about the whole family because there was no Itanium 2. Based on the recent edit history (mine and especially others) there is considerable confusion, and a lot of the market and application stuff relates only to the Itanium 2. After the split, the Itanium processor article will become purely historical.
The name change is important because, as User:NapoliRoma pointed out to me in a side discussion, most people who type "Itanium" into the search box are likey to want info on the latest processor.
I feel that the new Itanium article should not be integrated into the IA-64 article. The IA-64 article should focus on architecture, and we have no particular reason to believe that all future implementations of the architecture will be called Itanium. The Itanium article can be used for market, price, comparisons, applications, etc. Unless someone else either objects or undertakes this split, I will do the split on 2006-10-22. -Arch dude 17:28, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Splitting this Article 

message: How about adding some specmark specs so people can understand how powerful a processor is.
This should be done for all of the processors.
:This link:
::[Ideas SpecINT2006 Benchmarks]
:Shows that for Single Small/Medium/Large+Scientific installations,
:Opteron/Xeon is tops in the SpecINT2006 benchmark,
:while Itanium 2 dominates the Entiprise server market, but:
:IBMs benchmarks in TPS, show the Power6-Based p560 at the top of the 16 core benchmarks.
::[IBMs "Benchmarks"]
As for Benchmarking all the processors,
:Tomshardware had a great roundup of 65 processors at:
::[65 processor marathon of benchmarking]
:and of course, the wikipedia article on benchmarking is a bit dated,
but covers almost all of the relevant issues:
::[Benchmark (Computing)]
:But it neglets to mention 'The Chang Factor' where a chinese computer vendor slowed down the real time clock to increase benchmark performance.
:There are design factors that impact performance:
::[The Opteron onslaught on The Good Ship Itanic ]
"a quad-CPU Opteron 848 has 25.6 GB/s memory bandwidth, compared to just 6.4 GB/s in a quad-Itanium2"
:Finally, just so your brain can go tilt: The IA64 Itanium processor uses speculative branch predition more than any other processor. Profiling the benchmark code, and improving the compiler can and will have very dramatic effects on the benchmarks, and will show up in application performance. IBM has multiple decades in doing this.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Artoftransformation (talk • contribs) 19:11, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Speed benchmarks missing 

message: I have attempted to write a consolidated article, capturing all the important stuff from Itanium, Itanium 2, and IA-64, with the intent of replacing the three with one article named Itanium.
The proposed article is in my workspace. Please review and comment. (Comments on the proposed article's talk page, please.)
In addition to simplification and consolidation, I have attempted to add citations wherever I could, and I have removed some material that I could not find citations for. The article is basically a complete rewrite, but almost everything in it is from the original articles, with two major exceptions:
* The material on the architecture is considerably more detailed and focused on architecture.
* I added a timeline, moved many statements to the timeline, and added material to it.
We are still missing a lot of history from the timeline,(mostly 1994-1997) and we are missing a paragraph in the "History" section about the period from 2002 to present. However, this is material that is not present in the current articles either.
Thanks.-Arch dude 23:06, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am not a strong supporter of merging these three articles into one. I think that there is enough information to have separated articles and architecture is different thing than a processor. However, your article is quite good (for example, table for released processors looks much better than different sections in Itanium 2 article now) but I dislike a timeline. It feels like a collection of facts which unnecessary expands the article. All these facts can be (if not already) mentioned in appropriate sections of the article. However, if the merge is necessary I think we will need articles called Itanium (processor), Itanium 2 which can be smaller articles just about that processors and some facts about them without architecture details (in similar style like POWER and POWER5). Still when somebody will try to find information about IA-64 (architecture), it can be confused when it will be redirected to Itanium (series of microprocessors) so I would prefer at least to articles Itanium and IA-64. --Vezhlys 18:28, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  The most important stuff in the timeline is reflected in the chart, which is a later addition. I will attempt to consolidate the timeline facts into the history section, But the protracted development cycle is the central fact of Itanium, and we need to convey that. -Arch dude 19:13, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry Arch dude but I do not think I can agree with your self. You could not really call the original Itanium as crippled as sunning native applications it was very impressive for its time. The real problem lay in compatibility. HP and Intel gave the original Itanium a very basic and slow hardware computability with X86. I’m this aspect they shot them self in the feet. Its quite simple really, The IA-64 was a high end item and people using them wanted high end performance. So no one is going to get a Itanium system to run X86. Yet there was very limited native IA-64 code apart from true high end applications where code is generally developed for it like in the supercomputers already talked about in the wiki. A very similar situation accrued with the old Digital Alpha architecture. Most people are not bothered about how technically good a architecture is how greater the future potential is from crossing to a modern architecture. Most people will only see the small picture and if something runs the programs they have faster they want it. So no matter how inherently poor X86 is its what we have and what we have used for many years now. In so X86 has the most money invested in it because more people are after X86. But pleased don’t be fooled in to thinking X86 is anything special as its a long way from it. As for your Intel VS AMD remarks I think its best not to start that as it can not be won. Yes AMD can make code CPUs that can be used well in some situations. But on the time scale you are talking I was using Intel derived systems using 64 separate CPUs controlled under a single OS. At the time that was not possible from AMD.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.159.120.166 (talk) 14:03, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request for comment: consolidated article 

message: This replacement article removed all of the un verifiable hype in our existing articles. I cannot find anything positive to say that is not speculative.
However, there is still hope for Itanium. In particular:
* Montecito has fairly good SPEC numbers by comparison to Xeon and Opteron, even though  Montecito is still on a 90nm process while the other two are on more modern processes. This shows that IA-64 really is a superior architecture.
* Tukwila will be able to use commodity chipsets, thus permitting ISVs to build Itanium systems without investing huge amounts of money to develop a chipset.
* The original theoretical advantages of EPIC are finally realizable: the inherent codespace inefficiencies are much less relevant (cache is proportionately cheap) and the simplicity of EPIC permits a much smaller processor core to do more work. With multi-core dies, this means you can have more Itanium cores in the same space. 
So, the question is: how can we add this information to the article without violating WP:OR? -Arch dude 12:31, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help with futures? 

message: Are these environments supported on Itanium? Unisys systems have a mix of processors, and MCP and OS2200 are supported on the Xeons, for sure. Are they also supported on the Itaniums? if so, are they supported natively, or by instruction simulation? -Arch dude 12:31, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unisys MCP and OS2200? 

message: The reference to Gelato is slightly incorrect.  Gelato (see http://www.gelato.org ) is more than a developer community ... in fact most of its members are supercomputer sites, although it does have some developers (See the gelato membership page on http://www.gelato.org/participants/members.php for a breakdown).
Gelato is essentially an IA-64 user group, but certain members are sponsored to do particular projects ... for example UNSW to do superpage work, or the University of Waterloo to develop microC++.  in addition, as compiler technology is so important to IA-64, they've been sponsoring work on gcc (see http://gcc.gelato.org/)
Note: I'm Peter Chubb, from Gelato@UNSW.  I didn't want to add my biases into the main article.
65.91.54.2 04:55, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, Peter. I wrote that sentence based on cursory examination of the Gelato web page. It's possibly accurate, but clearly incomplete. May I reccomend that you please correct it, but in the context of this article? Then, please create a Gelato Federation article. and we can link to it. State you bias on the talk page of the new article and request a POV review. I for one will certainly try to help. Could you also comment on this new version of the Itanium article set? Thanks. -Arch dude 12:00, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: update - since you do not have a Wikipedia login, I have created a stub for your article. If you do not have time to fill it out, I'll add some general stuff from the web site tonight. -Arch dude 14:25, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  On Gelato 

message: I'm going to pull two spin-laden not-overly-factual statements. 
Article says: By 1997, most enterprise systems manufacturers (with the exception of Sun) were designing systems based on the Intels's projected IA-64 processor 
Besides the two grammar errors, DEC definitely wasn't, IBM was still quite devoted to the POWER2, and SGI was still mostly bound to MIPS, this would mean that only one of the top five enterprise vendors was taking the platform seriously, that being the one that invented it in the first place. Yes, IBM and SGI eventually shipped Itanium machines, but it's unclear that they were serious about it in 1997. 
Article says: Deployments have increased steadily since its introduction.
What the heck does this mean? That they still sell some of them? That initially deployed units are now being re-deployed to trash heaps?  -- Akb4 04:50, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The 1997 statement was unsupported, so you were correct to remove it. However, I think is was broadly accurate. I will do some research. IBM and SGI both released Itanium systems in 2001 that included their own custom chipsets: A chipset is a long lead-time design. DEC was almost gone. The "Deployments" verbiage was my attempt to balance the negative tone of tone of the article. I initially used "sales" instead of "deployments," but many of the initial systems appear to have been given away. Sales increased year to year from 2003 through 2006, to about $2.4Bn. -Arch dude 09:28, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  spin: most vendors? increasing deployments? 

message: I was on the Longhorn Beta website and it would appear the Microsoft has developed an Itanium Based version of its Server. "Windows Server "Longhorn" for Itanium-based Systems
This edition is designed for use with Intel Itanium 64-bit processors to provide web and applications server functionality on that platform. Other server roles and features may not be available." Thought this might be of interest to you all. 205.200.147.100 15:24, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dedicated Windows Longhorn Itanium Edition 

message: This article failed good article nomination. This is how the article, as of May 14, 2007, compares against the  six good article criteria:
:1. Well written?: Yes
:2. Factually accurate?: Yes
:3. Broad in coverage?: Yes
:4. Neutral point of view?: Yes
:5. Article stability? Yes
:6. Images?: Several images do not contain a  fair use rationale, so this article can't be passed.
When these issues are addressed, the article can be resubmitted for consideration.  If you feel that this review is in error, feel free to take it to a GA review.  Thank you for your work so far. 
— ~  G1ggy!  Reply | Powderfinger! 00:02, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: after addressing the problems with hte images, I have re-nominated the article for GA status. The problems were significant the the reviewer was quite right to raise them. I added the prpper "fair use rationales" on the two logo image pages, and I removed the improper justification on hte picture of the Itanium 2, tagged it as a copyvio on its image page, and removed it from this article. If Anyone has a digital camera and access to an Itanium 2, PLEASE take a picture of it and upload it to Wikicommons: ask me for help if you need it. Thanks. -Arch dude 23:31, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, it has passed GA, after passing the images criteria.  Congratulations! ~  G1ggy!  Reply | Powderfinger! 23:45, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

text: Yea, zoooooooooooom! Right through GA. Congradulations! This article clearly is the result of hard work. -- Jreferee (Talk) 23:18, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  
Failed
 Passed "good article" nomination 

message: In the processors table the mckinley has a 200MHz Bus and Montecito 533MHz - this imples a jump of more than 2 in bandwidth between the two which is very misleading. I suspect the frequencies listed aren't comparable or plain wrong. The original mckinly had 128 bits * 400MHz = 6.4GB/s of system bandwidth.
: I'm fairly sure these numbers are correct. I just did a google for itanium montecito 533 and another google for itanium mckinley 200 and did a spot-check of the hits. The numbers are supported by the articles. Note that Montecito is newer than McKinley by four years and two process generations. Also note that much of the criticism of the early Itaniums centered on the inadequate memory bus speed. Furthermore, a Montecito needs a faster bus because it has two cores. I did not add a reference for each reference in the table, as it would add too much clutter. I created the table from information that was in the earlier versions of the Itanium and Itanium 2 article when I did the merge. If you find references that show that the numbers are wrong, by all means fix the article. -Arch dude 01:04, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: As a cross-check, based on the List of Intel Xeon microprocessors, the Xeon in June 2002 had a FSB speed of 400MT/s, and the Xeon in June 2006 had a FSB speed of 1066 MT/s, so the two processors are on similar technology curves. (Note: nomenclature for FSB speeds is not well standardized.) -Arch dude 13:33, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

text: The original Itanium 2 (McKinley) used a 400MHz bus (200x2, or 100x4).  Montecito uses a 533MHz bus (266x2 or 133x4).  Imperator3733 16:12, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

text: So in that case as the 533Mhz stands for 17GB/s, does the 400Mhz of the original Itanium 2 (McKinley) than stand for 12,8Gb/s?  Massimo2007 12:18, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I don't think so.  I believe that the Itanium bus is 128-bit (or 16 byte).  16 bytes * 400 MHz = 6.40 GB/s and 16 bytes * 533 MHz = 8.53 GB/s.  I'm not sure, but I think that those are the correct BWs.  Imperator3733 16:12, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bus speeds correct? 

message: Itanium2 has been renamed into Itanium and the logo has been updated. The new logo is http://www.intel.com/sites/sitewide/pix/badges/itanium/itp_62.gif
Old logos should be replaced with new logos according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LOGO  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.174.127.189 (talk) 05:49, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: But in this case we really need to update the article to account for all of the events of the last two weeks. We should not just relpalce the lead Logo, we should move the old logo down to the correct spot in the History, change the name on the lead infobox, anc change all references to the oritinal (2001) from "Itanium' To "original Itanium." We also need to convert from "Montecito" beingthe current Itanium to "Montvale" being the current Itanium. I will do this  on  hteweekend if obidy does it first. -Arch dude 14:58, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Made preliminary changes including the new logo, But we still have work to do distinguish "original Itanium" from this new usage. -Arch dude 14:34, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Itanium logo 

message: In the table of processors, there is a reference to McKinley having "hardware branchlong".  This page provides no explanation of what that is, and Google was not very helpful other than to find another wiki that pulled an old version of the Itanium 2 WP page (which now redirects here) and indicates branchlong is an IA-64 instruction of some sort.  So does anyone have any further information? — Aluvus t/c 02:09, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: When I did the merge and rewrite, I collapsed a long set of short paragraphs into this tabular format. Each of the short paragraphs had (some of) the information that ended up all but the last column. In a few cases there was some very brief additional information. I mindlessly put that additional information into the last column. "Hardware branchlong" was not available in Merced.I got the impression that the instruction was therefore synthesized, probably  via a trap. The real instruction was added to the architecture starting with McKinley, and it exists in all subsequent Itaniums. I cannot recall where I saw this described, but I did check it at that  time. If I can find the reference, I will put it into the "architectural changes" section. If you find it first, may I recommend that you put it there? -Arch dude 13:29, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Just an update: some research for another project turned up more information about this instruction.  It is used to allow branches to make large jumps (skipping a large number of instructions), rather than making multiple short jumps to accomplish the same result.  The mnemonic is brl.  It is described on page 69 of the Itanium 2 reference manual.  I am not sure how much of this information is worth including in the article, but in any event this takes a lot of the mystery out of this instruction. — Aluvus t/c 02:33, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hardware branchlong? 

message: Note. For interested authors, debate and a vote is ongoing on Talk:MOSNUM regarding a proposal that would deprecate the use of computer terms like “kibibyte” (symbol “KiB”), “mebibyte” (symbol “MiB”), and kibibit (symbol “Kib”). It would no longer be permissible to use terminology like a “a SODIMM card with a capacity of two gibibytes (2 GiB) first became available…” and instead, the terminology currently used by manufacturers of computer equipment and general-circulation computer magazines (“two gigabytes, or 2 GB”) would be used. Voting on the proposal is ongoing here.  Greg L (my talk) 21:20, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  MiB and KiB v.s. MB and KB 

message: I reverted a substantial set of formatting edits made by an anon using 68.148.164.166. The edits were a good-faith attempt to improve the article, but I arrived at the original format after quite a lot of thought and experimentation, and I personally like the old way better. If there is a consensus that the new format is better, we can revert my revert. Please discuss here.
Basically, timelines are generally deprecated. I retained the timeline originally because I thought it was the best way to succinctly express the long and twisty history that is the true story of Itanium. However, the newer format caused a major visual expansion to the timeline, giving it undue weight. Worse, the new format, which uses additional levels of TOC headers, caused a huge expansion to the TOC, Which destroyed the continuity from the lead to the second section. The TOC expansion also gives a casual reader the impression that the TOC is the bulk of the article.
The best solution would be a timeline using the magic timeline template, but that template is very hard to use. -Arch dude (talk) 17:51, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timeline format 

message: There is apparently some widespread confusion between x86-64 and ia64 ... Based on this very article (or worse, based on the Core 2 article) one might not realize that IA-64 (which redirects to this article about the "itanium" processor) is an instruction set, and is used on core 2, centrino, and xeon as well.
* intel's list of ia-64 based processors someone else will need to fix this as I'm pressed for time and must log out very soon.
* Arg, this sort of misinformation makes wikipedia really unreliable for software porting usage ((end of line)) Kuzetsa (talk) 22:57, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: You should better get your data sorted, you are mixing IA64 (Itanium) with x86-64 (AMD 64) which Intel labeled as Intel 64 (previously EM64T).
Please read the article carefully: it is correct. The IA64 instruction set implemented on Itanium is radically different from the x86 and x86-64 instruction sets. Itanium an Itanium 2 are the only processors in the whole wide world that implement IA64. By contrast, x86 was first implemented on the 80386 and has been implemented on about eight successive generatin of Intel priocessors, on five generations of 
AMD processors, and on processors from VIA, Cyris and Transmeta. Starting in 2003, AMD implemented a 64-bit superset of x86 that they called AMD64. Intel implemented a vert slightly different superset called EMT64. The industry uses the generic term x86-64 to refer to both: neither of then has anythigh whatsoever to do with the IA64 instructins set, which was developed in 1994. Please carefully read the Itanium article and the x86-64 article. Xeons and Core 2 implement x86-64. They do not implement IA64. -Arch dude (talk) 03:54, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Itanium processors need an article seperate from an article about (ia-64) 

message: A discussion has been started at WP:MOSNUM concerning the continued deprecation of IEC prefixes.  Please comment at the MOSNUM talk page. Thunderbird2 (talk) 19:19, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should MOSNUM continue to deprecate IEC prefixes? 

message: This page used to include extremely intelligent and factually correct technical criticism of the Itanium. For no reason that has been explained, all criticism has been removed. I am simply asking someone to explain why descriptions of the the technical shortcoming of the Itanium can not be allowed? Surely the utter failure in the marketplace of the Itanium needs some kind of explanation? To give only one side of the story is self evidently POV. Timharwoodx (talk) 20:24, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The article is currently in substantially the same form it was in after I consolidated three articles and substantially re-wrote the result. That was more than a year ago. The original articles, taken together, looked like Intel/HP press releases, and I was disgusted by the extreme bias in favor of the Itanium. The rewrite was intended to remove the extreme pro-Itanium POV. It is possible that I did not go far enough because I was overcompensating for my feelings about this steaming pile of dung.  One of the things I did during the rewrite was to attempt to find reliable sources for all assertions. That's why the article now has more than 50 references instead of almost no references as before. I removed statements for which I could not find references. Some of the removals were in response to a (failed) Featured Article review.  If you would like to re-integrate some or all of the material you feel was improperly removed, please feel free to do so, but please provide references. I would be more than happy to help. I did cut down on the material in the "original Itanium" article, but that was because it is a relatively small part of the whole Itanium story as a whole. I hope that the sales projection chart and the timeline convey the true nature of the Itanium tragi-comedy. -Arch dude (talk) 21:20, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

text: (After some brief research) The material you copied above was present in the "Itanium" article as of this version, in October 2006, just before I started messing with the articles. Note that there were no references. After working on the articles off and on, I finally completed my merge in May of 2007. I just did  a cursory check, and I appears that all of the material appears in some form in the merged article, but not all in one place, because I re-organized the article as part of the emerge/rewrite. As far as I can tell, the only material that did not survice is material for which I could not find a specfic reference. Over the course of many edits, I made the material more concise. This was not an attempt to soften the criticism: In fact, I believe the "Original Itanium" section is fairly damning and conveys the intent of the non-architectural part of the older material. -Arch dude (talk) 23:09, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reasons for adding POV tag 

message: The "Instruction execution" subsection under "Architecture", which I assume is about Itanium, describes it as having two FMAC units and "miscellaneous" units. My understanding is that it has two 82-bit FMAC units and two SIMD FMAC units that each operate on two single-precision floating-point numbers. Does this mean that the "miscellaneous" units are the SIMD FMACs? If they are, then they should be described as such instead of a vague mention with scare quotes. Rilak (talk) 08:16, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Welcome to Wikipedis, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. "Anyone," in this case, means you. Please feel free to read the Intel architecture document that is cited as a reference, and then update the article. The section as it stands today is mostly my work and is a major improvement over what it looked like before I started, but I'm not an expert. I merely spent about half an hour reading the refreence, and then tried to condense the relevant stuff into this article. You are probably at least as qualified to correct it as I am. If you have a conflict of interest or prefer not to edit the article, please suggest wording here, and someone will come along and fix the article. -Arch dude (talk) 15:07, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks for the welcome, but I have been editing for quite a some time (check my contribs). The reason I am not editing was because I don't believe I have sufficient understanding of the Itanium's microarchitecture. I'll get some research done, and fix the article. Rilak (talk) 07:59, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Done. Rilak (talk) 08:23, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Floating-point execution in Itanium 

message: I edited the page to give consistent use of KiB etc. when I saw it.  Someone later told me that there have been edit wars on the subject, and that the consensus keeps changing.  So let me justify my edit:  the use of footnotes to explain what KB means is just lame prose.  The term KiB means that, and it can be hyperlinked so those unfamiliar with it can just click it right there!  I made sure at least one instance was linked in each section.
Elements of the CPU architecture such as the cache are technical items, so readers should not have any trouble with it if they understood the paragraph anyway.
If there is still concern over using terms introduced to solve a specific problem, perhaps we need a template that will expand out to the reigning approach.  If avoiding the new terms, it would need to use the suggested parentetical comment of spelling out the meaning in-line.
Also note that MHz and MiB are in close proximity, so one article-wide definition of what "mega" means will not work cleanly.
Długosz (talk) 22:43, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Lets us not argue it here. Instead, Please argue the on the talk page of WP:MOSNUM. I think we can agree that the Itanium article should adhere to to WP:MOSNUM, even if we do not agree with the consensus there. There have been 16 separate extensive (heated) discussions there, the first in 2005 and the latest in 2008. I personally do not care either way, but it is extremely irritating to have to re-edit this article to keep up with changes in the MOSNUM. I agree that we should template this so we can let the fanatics change all references in a single place. this entire issue is WP:LAME to the extreme.  The current consensus(?) is that the overwhelming majority of references use kB/MB/GB to meand 210/220/230, and that the overwhelming majority of readers understand these terms but do not understand KiB/MiB/GiB. I propose that we add templates  , , , etc, that use two variables: #USE_IEC and #EXPAND_IEC. The two variables are not set by default. If #USE_IEC is set, we use KiB, etc. If not set, we use kB, etc. If #EXPAND_IEC is set, we add the parenthetical decimal expansion (1024) or whatever. If not set, we do not. For now, we will set (or not) these variables in another template, , which goes at the head of the article, but a user may also set these in their CSS. The varous templates can be made to also add a footnote. -Arch dude (talk) 01:10, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Binary Prefixes for K(i)B etc.