Architosh Staff ([email protected])

30 Sep 2004

 

In Brief: ArchiCAD 9, Calculating ROI for BIM, and Intel's Itanium Failure is IBM's PowerPC Success

ArchiCAD 9 German Edition is now shipping

Graphisoft's flagship ArchiCAD 9 program is now shipping in a German language version to European markets. The International and US version are now shipping as well in over 30 countries, a full list of which can be seen here: www.graphisoft.com/products/ac9/

Calculating ROI for BIM

Cadalyst magazine online has an interesting article on calculating return on investment (ROI) for building information modeling (BIM). The article -- which discusses Autodesk Revit -- details a ROI for BIM formula that factors in the productivity side of such a transition. For those interested in making their own calculations (and it doesn't have to be BIM or even CAD) this article is a very good source of information and guidance.

Intel's Itanium Failure Grows - IBM's PowerPC Success Better Positioned

Back in the 90's Intel and HP's planned Itanium 64-bit processor was suppose to be the RISC chip killer. Sparc, MIPS, POWER, PowerPC and other RISC chips commonly used in the world's most powerful computers (called workstations) ran 64-bit instruction sets for scientists and engineers the world over. Intel's x86 based Pentium line couldn't compete back then and so it was that Itanium was going to change the world and take RISC out of the game.

That didn't happen!

Hewlett-Packard, one of the co-architects of the Itanium and its most aggressive backer, has just announced that it is ditching the Itanium family of processors for its 64-bit workstations. Instead, HP is following the growing trend in focusing on Opteron chips for 64-bit workstations. The trend in the workstation market, according to a C/net report, is towards 64-bit extension technology.

Itanium always required software developers to rewrite their software code base, including the operating system itself, in order to reap the full benefits of the chip. In the Windows market in particular developers are loathe to go out and do this before a market materializes. And so the classic "chick and egg" problem emerges. Without sales developers don't budge; without applications sales don't take off.

In exchange for this loss the market is tending to support older architectures with extension technology that adds 64-bit addressing to older 32-bit processor architectures. But extension technology is inferior technology in the chip market. That's why Itanium was developed in the first place.

IBM's powerful PowerPC chip family, including most importantly the G5 chip used in the Power Mac, was originally architected to scale from 32-bit to 64-bit naturally. Unlike what Intel has done with the 64-bit extensions it has made to the aging Xeon family of chips, the IBM PowerPC 970 and future 980 series processors are true 64-bit processors with integrated support for legacy 32-bit code bases. Not the other way around.

With the strength of market share growth for IBM's PowerPC line (IBM's 64-bit PowerPC technology is going into all the leading game machines, Apple computers, IBM workstations and even big IBM supercomputers) Intel's so called RISC killer doesn't appear all too scary for any of the RISC boys, especially the boys at Big Blue.

To read the full C/net article go here.

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