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> It's time to start fresh with a new architecture if they want to maintain their reputation of having the most powerful technology. They tried that, though. I

> It's time to start fresh with a new architecture if they want to maintain their reputation of having the most powerful technology. They tried that, though. It was called Itanium and it went nowhere. Now, Itanium had all kinds of other problems and I wouldn't call its failure incontrovertible evidence against "Intel should make a new architecture", but I can understand why the company isn't eager to try that again. Backwards compatibility exerts an powerful gravitational pull that is extremely difficult to break away from if you're not started a new platform ex nihilo (which Apple did for the iPhone).

lend000 10y ago
> It was called Itanium and it went nowhere. It was popular in its intended niche (HPC) for a while, but the value proposition was not sufficient. It dropped some x86 baggage but it didn't add anything fundamentally superior on top of it -- the ILP could easily be attained by having more cores on x86. To be honest I actually really like what they did with Itanium, but it wasn't a good enough innovation to break off the family line of backwards compatibility.
- scholia 10y ago
  It wasn't intended to be a niche product. That was just how it ended up....
pcwalton 10y ago
Look at what ARM did with AArch64 though: it's backwards compatible via mode switching but is otherwise a fairly clean break at the ISA level. AMD probably could have done something similar. They just didn't, likely out of risk aversion.
brandonmenc 10y ago
> They tried that, though. It was called Itanium And the i860, and i960, and i432...
bluedino 10y ago
Was the Itanium fiasco more HP or Intel's fault? Either way, it's been 20+ years they could try again.
- fnord123 10y ago
  I thought they learned that exposing the complexity was a big problem. So now the chips are internally complex but hide it behind the instruction set interface while the chip does its own stuff in the microcode.

lend000 10y ago

> It was called Itanium and it went nowhere. It was popular in its intended niche (HPC) for a while, but the value proposition was not sufficient. It dropped some x86 baggage but it didn't add anything fundamentally superior on top of it -- the ILP could easily be attained by having more cores on x86. To be honest I actually really like what they did with Itanium, but it wasn't a good enough innovation to break off the family line of backwards compatibility.

scholia 10y ago
It wasn't intended to be a niche product. That was just how it ended up....

pcwalton 10y ago

Look at what ARM did with AArch64 though: it's backwards compatible via mode switching but is otherwise a fairly clean break at the ISA level. AMD probably could have done something similar. They just didn't, likely out of risk aversion.

brandonmenc 10y ago

> They tried that, though. It was called Itanium And the i860, and i960, and i432...

bluedino 10y ago

Was the Itanium fiasco more HP or Intel's fault? Either way, it's been 20+ years they could try again.

fnord123 10y ago
I thought they learned that exposing the complexity was a big problem. So now the chips are internally complex but hide it behind the instruction set interface while the chip does its own stuff in the microcode.