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The funny thing is that the Intel 8800 (iAPX 432) was supposed to be Intel's big new thing, a 32-bit processor designed for object-oriented languages. Unfortuna
by kens 6y ago
The funny thing is that the Intel 8800 (iAPX 432) was supposed to be Intel's big new thing, a 32-bit processor designed for object-oriented languages. Unfortunately, that project fell behind schedule and Intel quickly threw together a chip, the 8086, so they'd have something to sell until the iAPX 432 was ready.
Unexpectedly, the 8086 took over the world and the iAPX 432 was a failure. The bad design that shipped beat the good design that was late and slow. Intel repeated this with the Itanium, their super new design that was supposed to take over in 2001. Again, the superior design was slow, late, and a market failure.
I'm not sure what the moral of this is. Maybe it illustrates the "worse is better" principle.
- rhabarba 6y agoIronically, 32-bit machines were already over and done when Intel made theirs.
- ncmncm 6y agoI don't understand this claim. ARM won mobile with 32 bits. The 64-bit designs existed largely because they were keeping out of Intel's way.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ncmncm 6y ago"Worse is better" always covers up facts that are too embarrassing to somebody to say out loud. In the case of x86, Intel's, then IBM's, then Microsoft's thumbs were firmly on the scale. It collapsed vs. amd64 because their thumbs were off.
- jecel 6y agoIntel likes to pretend that the iAPX432 never happened. Some friends and I were waiting for it to be released to build a machine around it, but then the Berkeley RISC papers came out with their benchmarks. Even though the 8086 was far slower than RISC I it was still so much faster than the 432 that we dropped our plans. Intel had been proposing that the 8086 would be an i/o controller for the 432 but now this would be like having your keyboard processor be much faster than your CPU. The second version (i960) kept the good parts of the iAPX432 while making it very competitive but by then the PC had made that irrelevant.
- jhallenworld 6y agoItanium 2 and beyond were fast, but no argument that it failed. Even so I read that HP took final orders for Itanium systems this year. SPEC benchmarks fom 2003: CINT2000 Itanium 2 1.5 GHz - 1322 Xeon 3.06 GHz - 1242 Opteron 1.8 GHz - 1095 CFP2000 Itanium 2 1.5 GHz - 2119 Xeon 3.06 GHz - 1173 Opteron 1.8 GHz - 1122
- ncmncm 6y agoAmd64 caught up and passed it when?