Linux on Super Chips
What do Intel and AMD have planned for Linux? And where does Transmeta fit
Wednesday, August 15th, 2001
This is the year Intel finally joins the big leagues when it comes to the server market. After gradually creeping up the Unix food chain with its Pentium and Xeon processor lines, the Santa Clara company hopes to finally stand on equal ground with the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processors that have fueled rival processors like PA-RISC, PowerPC, and UltraSPARC. The key? Intel’s next-generation line of 64-bit microprocessors: Itanium.
The idea behind Itanium is to decouple the operating system providers from their hardware design. As microprocessor manufacturing became more complex in the early 1990s, Hewlett-Packard began to suspect that the cost of producing their own chips was exceeding the benefits of controlling their design. The company licensed some technology to Intel, and the two companies began work on what they hoped would become an industry-standard microprocessor design.
One by one, the RISC systems vendors came on board: IBM, Digital Equipment Corp (now Compaq), SGI, Fujitsu, Bull, and so on. As the Itanium PR campaign picked up steam, companies began jockeying to become the standard operating system provider for the new platform. IBM, Sequent, and SCO teamed up to create a standard Itanium Unix, code-named Monterey [IBM has since renamed the project AIX 5L -Ed.]; Sun positioned Solaris as a possible contender; HP had its own HP-UX; and, as always, Microsoft waited in the wings.
And then along came Linux.
