Linus Torvalds (torvalds@linux-foundation.org) on 2/6/09 wrote:
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>Intel could drop IPF tomorrow, and nobody would care.

LOL, wish projection on your part.

Not only does IPF refuse to die but it refuses to falter.
IPF system sales have grown monotonically by $1B/yr
for the last five years in a row. In contrast x86's growth
has slowed significantly, even shrinking in revenue in
Q2 and Q3.

You have little more than your personal prejudices and
biases to go on. Intel management knows how much it
costs to develop brand new IPF microarchitectures, how
much it costs to make IPF processors, what it can sell
them for, and a damn good idea of the total available
market open to IPF for any given combination of features,
performance, and pricing. You can't imagine *anything*
at all more important than clock rate yet Intel chose to
sacrifice ~10% of the frequency of Tukwila, about 200
MHz or more, to use flip-flops that are 100 times more
resistant to soft errors than those used in its cheaper
high volume products. Maybe those who were born into
a PC mentality happily accept the occasional funny now
and then but I am sure glad my banks don't. :-)

Not only does Intel refuse to kill it but they keep ramping
up the resources available to the IPF business group as
sales grow. Since 2007 Intel has had two full processor
design teams with over 1000 engineers designing two
successive generations of processors beyond Tukwila.
Those are not actions of a company reluctantly going
through the motions to fulfill contractual obligations.
Intel could have kept shrinking the I2 core into process
after process with less than a 1/10th of the manpower
and money it is investing. Intel also didn't have to let IPF
skip right over 45 nm altogether and grant it equal timely
access to 32 nm as Xeon MP.

IMO any rational person pondering the real viability of
and business case for IPF should put far more weight
on the *actions* of Intel than the *words* of somebody
who has been increasingly laughably predicting doom
since more than five years and about $20B worth of IPF
sales ago.