Sail Virtually Aboard the “Itanic” with IA-64 Emulator

Intel's Itanium processor—nicknamed the 'Itanic' after its commercial failure—apparently still fascinates some developers. Hackaday reports that a team has built an IA-64 emulator in alpha that can boot Gentoo, Windows Server two thousand three, and Windows XP-64, though performance runs at roughly four-eighty-six-level speeds on modern hardware. What makes this impressive is that IA-64's Very Long Instruction Word architecture was notoriously difficult to program and optimize for—making an emulator for such an exotic system a genuinely impressive technical achievement, even at this early stage.

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