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Nah. Intel tried several times to quit the x86. They couldn't because the market rejected anything that wasn't backwards compatible.
by Double_Cast 10y ago
Nah. Intel tried several times to quit the x86. They couldn't because the market rejected anything that wasn't backwards compatible.
- m_mueller 10y agowell, did they try it for the mobile or the HPC market?
- hobo_mark 10y agoYou mean with XScale and Itanium? Yes they tried.
- vidarh 10y agoThe market rejected it for desktops and servers. But not in other markets. Which is why Intel is still selling in the hundreds of millions of CPUs, while ARM licensees are selling in the billions, and MIPS and PPC licensees are also selling in the hundreds of millions (but reap far less revenue than Intel, as more of are low price units going into embedded systems).
- chrishacken 10y agoI have a feeling that the market rejected it because rewriting a ton of software didn't make sense for a negligible performance "upgrade", not because it wasn't backwards compatible. There were also emulators available to run x86 code. > When first released in 2001, Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors. - Wikipedia
- 0xcde4c3db 10y agoI think the backwards compatibility problem wasn't that it lacked backwards compatibility, but rather that the proposition was to pay more to run your existing binaries slower. I recall Pentium Pro having a similar problem with 16-bit code.