Route 64 - Kang Su Gatlin talks about 64-bit (Part II)

Interesting stuff - as he says, inevitable!

I would like to hear more about the Itanium and any long term plans to really leverage it, rather than carry on treating it as the next x86.

I bumped into a guy on a Train the other month who is selling a Grid-micro-OS that runs in the L2 cache on Itanium systems that can process data used in science and banking systems 4x-10x faster than the best x86 systems because they are data flow driven and drive the Itanium at near full whack by keeping it supplied by lots of concurrent units of work. He was saying that some of his customers have been able to easily halve the number of computing nodes used to process their data, with capacity to spare.

He was also mentioning about scaling apps up across processors, dual cores, grid nodes, etc and that there has to be a shift in how software is designed, from multi-threaded to "multi process" so that parallel parts of an app can run anywhere, not just on one node/CPU.
I can see this as very important since clock speeds are unlikely to rise soon, but the number of cores is in the near future. I'm sure that's the sort of thing Indigo is for though...