Intel’s free literature

I noticed that you are able to order hard-copy’s of Intel’s books on the IA-32, 64 and Itanium architecture. So I did.

Today, a few days later, I received them. They’re very informative thorough and well structured. And, in contrary to other professional literature, you are able to read it without crunching your brains on one jargon-filled sentence. Basically free, dense and easily read books and great references.

So, a big thank you to Intel for this nice free service.

By the way, Itanium seems to really rock. (256 registers, compiler branch prediction, 8-superscalar, etc)

Also, I’ve got no spare room anymore on my desk. 🙂

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Power PC dumped

Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

When Apple will switch to x86 and ia64 it will be possible to run mac osX on your own home bought computer, given that they don’t avoid it by changing some opcodes.

One other things is sure; they will loose some power. As long as they provide binaries and provide one set for all apple computers they will have to add support for both ppc and x86 in one binary distribution which will undoubtely be a lot bigger if not slower too.

It will be interesting to see how this issue will evolve.