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> the best compilers were not free This must have been a huge part. Maybe ICC could squeeze more MIPS per dollar out of Itanium than x86, but if GCC can't, peo

• acdha 5y ago
  It was especially hard because compatibility was not a given and proprietary compilers of that era were notorious for having both compatibility issues and fragile optimizations where seemingly minor code changes had large performance impacts, especially when they’d basically targeted one SPEC benchmark. I saw multiple times where teams switched to GCC for compatibility/features and the performance impact on most other platforms was relatively modest.