> how many companies wanted to dig into assembly instead of just waiting 18-24 months for Moore's Law to speed up their software?
The people that bought Itanium-powered servers certainly weren't replacing them every 18-24 months. At the price they paid, you were looking at 5-8 years of computing before replacement. Or more.
My employer bought a pair of the final batch of Itanium servers. To replace 10-year old ones. This was an insurance purchase. The original plan was to shift all of that workload into the cloud, but that's neither going quickly enough nor is it saving any money. If you have a workload for which Itanium does well, it does it really well.
> The people that bought Itanium-powered servers certainly weren't replacing them every 18-24 months.
I was referring to the software vendors: why would they go through the effort of optimizing their code for this new architecture when they could simply wait a little while for the "old" one to get faster via Moore's Law?
The people that bought Itanium-powered servers certainly weren't replacing them every 18-24 months. At the price they paid, you were looking at 5-8 years of computing before replacement. Or more.
My employer bought a pair of the final batch of Itanium servers. To replace 10-year old ones. This was an insurance purchase. The original plan was to shift all of that workload into the cloud, but that's neither going quickly enough nor is it saving any money. If you have a workload for which Itanium does well, it does it really well.