These days I have been testing all of our 64-bit labs on a Montecito (Itanium) box that was lent to use by HP.  The newest feature of this new chip is the fact that it has two cores, which should make multi-threaded applications perform a lot faster.  I have not developed in a while for the Itanium, and one of the first things that struck me was the fact that there is no "Intel Compiler Installer" available for download.  As of version 9.1.028, the compiler installer includes compilers for x86, x64, and IA64 - sweet.

While following my usual install procedure (click next until the installer finishes) I noticed that my IA64 compiler was completely broken - even when compiling a Hello World.  The error I got was the following:

icl: internal error: Assertion failed (shared/driver/drvutils.c, line 535)

After reading some forums which did not hint me at all what the problem was, I decided to re-install but this time around reading the installer screens.   It happens that one of the requirements for this compiler to work is that it needs the PSDK from Microsoft installed, something that I had completely forgotten to do.  Once I installed the PSDK, the IA64 compiler was a happy camper and everything worked OK.  Hopefully, some desperate soul will be able to find this info if they ever face that dreaded message.