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I don't think they would have ever made Itanium mobile, instead we'd be stuck with that PAE nonsense, and living in 32bit world, because 'general users don't ne

• wmf 8y ago
  I think Intel wanted to eventually phase out x86 and push Itanium all the way down the stack, not for technical reasons but because it was a proprietary architecture that would never have competing implementations.
  • FullyFunctional 8y ago
    You are think of Intel as having a single mind. The reality, and the reality of most large organizations, is that the ant hill is beaming with divergent and competing opinions. In particular, there were two powerful, competing camps: x86 and Itanium. The combined effect of Itanium performance not living up to promises [1] and AMD introducing a 64-bit x86 extension shifted the power balance, but it wasn't an inevitable outcome. [1] The first iteration (I have one in the garage) was ~ 486 level fast and, sure, the final iterations were fast, but that took an AWFUL lot of silicon. The perf/transistor is terrible, even worse than x86 (which is bad).