NEC's chief architect Len Tsai launched an astonishing attack on Intel's Itanium processor at Bert McComas' Platforms Conference in San Jose today.

Tsai stunned the room by describing Intel's approach as "brute force", and predicted that learning the new instruction set would take "half a generation". He said NEC - which shipped its Itanic2 servers last week, had not seen any demand for the ten-year old processor.

Ouch.

NEC has been an OEM for HP's PA-RISC processor and HP-UX licensee for several years, and in happier days, the two co-developed the PA-RISC-based NX7000.

NEC had developed its own 64bit RISC processor in the mid 1990s but used it in technical supercomputing servers, rather than in its commercial data-processing systems. You can read all about NEC's microprocessors here.

HP superstar Jerry Huck replied that the longer you get to know the EPIC instruction set, the more you get to love it. (Which with some lasses, is very true indeed. Aww).

InfoWorld has a report here.

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