7 ms·

I would like the suggest the Itanium was a huge business success. At the start of the 90s, there were many decent workstation CPUs: SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha,

I would like the suggest the Itanium was a huge business success. At the start of the 90s, there were many decent workstation CPUs: SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, and PA-RISC. Intel CPUs were not considered in the same class. Big engineering work was done on workstations powered by these chips. But as the decade went on, the chips became vastly more complex and expensive to design. Near the middle of the decade, it was becoming clear what the trajectory was and companies started looking around trying to figure out how to navigate this. On top of this problem, Intel/HP teamed up to design a processor that was quite beyond (in terms of complexity) anything being designed at the time and it became clear competing was just not economically feasible. So basically the industry folded. In one move, Intel took out entire industry of companies that could compete. PowerPC is still there, but is marginal. SPARC, PA-RISC, MIPS, and Alpha design teams are gone. Interesting technical tidbit - I remember an Intel engineer giving a talk at Stanford about the architecture and Hennessy came to listen. At the end of the talk he asked why they thought moving so much complexity to the compiler would work when other (including John) found it to be problematic? They didn't have an answer and I could see the look on John's face and at that point realized they might not understand what they are getting into.

jabl 5y ago
True, but the other side of the coin is that the massive economics of scale in chip manufacturing as well as around ISA ecosystems (software) meant that some massive consolidation of the industry was all but inevitable. Had Intel not embarked on the Itanium project, we might still have ended up with something close to the world we have now, with x86-64 and ARM being the top dogs, and some "traditional RISC workstation" architecture surviving in a small high-end niche (POWER).
- throwaway9870 5y ago
  No question there are a lot of ways to win, probably many better than what transpired. But in the end, Itanium played a big role in Intel consolidating the CPU market and taking complete control for a significant period of time.
nabla9 5y ago
Itanium was disappointing from the day one. Itanium never matched the performance of RISC or CISC competitors (POWER, SPARC, x86). HP replaced Alpha with Itanium but that was a costly mistake.
- throwaway9870 5y ago
  Alpha was DEC, HP had PA-RISC. I had a PA-RISC in my office and had to have facilities come and adjust air conditioning airflow because the computer put off so much heat.
  - icedchai 5y ago
    They may have meant that HP acquired Compaq, which had acquired DEC. Itanium was a joint project between HP and Intel, IIRC.
  - nabla9 5y ago
    HP had PA-RISC and Alpha. HP bought Compaq 2001, Compaq had bought DEC earlier.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Not all of them did. I have a 712 PA-RISC workstation and its CPU is passively cooled with a spring loaded tiny cooling block. They didn't even bother to use paste.
    - acomjean 5y ago
      I had a PA-RISC workstation too. No heat problems, but it wasn't particularly fast. But the "superdomes" (Refigerator sized computer in the very cold and loud server room....). It was weird, I worked on those superdome machines for years without seeing them. and only got to see them when they had to debug some of my serial port code (it turned out the cable was wired wrong...) HPUX had some really interesting Real Time Extensions. I was on a exploratory group for switching to Linux and scheduling control was going to be a problem (15 years ago...)
fatbird 5y ago
Your causality doesn't seem to line up. As you tell it, the workstation CPUs were already peaking in terms of complexity and cost, when Intel and HP announce a huge investment in the next generation of this class of CPU. This doesn't signal that the segment is economically unviable, and if you're an existing player with an existing strong design, it signals an opportunity to invest in your own next generation and meet Intel/HP head-on with a superior brand (for this segment) and a more plausible next-gen design. Intel and HP show up promising a clean sheet design in a decade doesn't seem like a time to roll up your market leading offering and go home.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Nothing about this history lines up with facts. Intel killed the RISC workstation CPUs with the Pentium Pro, not with the Itanium. PRO/Engineer and SolidWorks had been ported to Windows NT at the very beginning of that operating system's availability, and the performance on x86 was already better than RISC workstations, at a tiny fraction of the cost, by late 1995.
  - throwaway9870 5y ago
    The Pentium Pro and eventually the AMD64 chips equalled or bested the workstations on many tasks by the end of the 90's and early 2000s. But the Itanium processor distracted them from even competing. SGI for example had at least one high-end MIPS processor under development (iirc "the beast") and they stopped the project and later were trying to ship Itanium servers. HP threw the towel in and joined forces with Intel. Here is an article from 1999 on Sun booting SunOS on Itanium: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sun-boots-solaris-on-itanium-hardware-5000103621/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sun-boots-solaris-on-itanium-h... Compaq stopped making Alpha servers and switched to Itanium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha Itanium was a huge misdirection and distraction for everyone in the workstation business and basically put them in such a bad spot they failed to even compete with Intel x86 past 2000 or so in any real way.
- cpleppert 5y ago
  The Itanium wasn't just designed as a workstation CPU it was designed to be superior to existing high-end systems and then over time with volume be the eventual x86 replacement. The business case for itanium didn't work as a workstation cpu. >>Intel and HP show up promising a clean sheet design in a decade doesn't seem like a time to roll up your market leading offering and go home. They didn't roll up so much as have their existing market disappear. SGI, DEC and Compaq were dead. Sparc and Power gradually transitioned away from any workstation offering to servers.
mumblemumble 5y ago
Sort of the New Coke theory of CPUs. I like it. -- For anyone who wasn't there: In the 80s, Coca-Cola had lost its crown. Pepsi was the most popular soft drink, at least in the USA. Coca-Cola responded by changing their recipe, to great fanfare. It's often held up as one of American business's greatest failures. People hated New Coke, and later that year they brought back the old formula, under the name Coca-Cola Classic. I think that that summary of the story misses an important point, though. After the dust had settled. Coke had regained its crown, and has held it ever since. So, while New Coke itself failed on the market, the event's long-term influence on the company's financial outcomes was overwhelmingly positive. To the extent that some people have claimed that the whole thing was just an exceptionally clever PR stunt.
- sneak 5y ago
  FWIW, both New Coke and Coke "Classic" (aka new coke 1.1) both use high fructose corn syrup, which is substantially cheaper in the USA in industrial quantities due to huge tax-funded agricultural subsidies for corn (maize) farmers. These remain in place today (which is why everything in the US is sweetened with corn syrup instead of sugar). "Old coke", as well as what is now known as "mexican coke" in the USA, used/use sugar. New coke was the flag day for switching to a cheaper sweetener in the US market. When they switched "back" to coke "classic", they kept the new sweetener.
  - lizknope 5y ago
    This article claims that Coca Cola switched to high fructose corn syrup in 1984 which was a year before the debut of New Coke https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/07/the-secret-history-of-why-soda-companies-switched-from-sugar-to-high-fructose-corn-syrup/ https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/07/the-secret-history-...
  - creamytaco 5y ago
    When I first moved to USA from Denmark, back in the late 90s, the chemical, sickly syrupy taste of Coca Cola made me gag and I was very surprised in terms of how different it was from the European version. Then I found out that in Europe, they use sugar rather than corn syrup. It's amazing what the Americans will put up with.
pjc50 5y ago
Back in the day of 2001, I was working on the hugely cross-platform Zeus Web Server. It served the whole selection of UNIX platforms: https://web.archive.org/web/20011208194616/http://www.zeus.com/products/zws/tech_info/platform_supp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20011208194616/http://www.zeus.c... We certainly had an Itanium build as well, although it doesn't appear on that list, which suggests that it never sold. But it's notable how many of those platforms are effectively dead and only the open source ones on x86 are left standing - and OSX, which deliberately has no server platform. That era was when people were just starting to realise how much more cost-effective OSS+X86 was. That is what ate the server and workstation markets, especially once people started to horizontally scale and "the cloud" appeared. The only orgs left with the capacity to choose a new platform and make it cost-effective for the world are basically FAANG+M. And which one of them bought a fabless semi company full of RISC designers from all those dead instruction sets? Apple.
- jandrese 5y ago
  The article makes it sound like Itanium was some genius move on Intel's part to kill off the old workstation market, but IMHO that's exactly the opposite. This was Intel spending god knows how much money to jump into the workstation market right as it was suffering its final death throes from fatal wounding it took from the PC clone market. Sure those workstations were powerful and had impeccable engineering, but they also cost at least 5 times as much as a similarly powerful PC. Sometimes more a full order of magnitude more. Plus they were full of obnoxious licensing requirements, like making you purchase a compiler for thousands of dollars per year or requiring you to buy an obscenely overpriced support contract to get OS updates. They just couldn't complete with some cheap clone running Linux, especially as Intel poured way more money into R&D each year and overtook the workstation chips. By the time the Core architecture, and especially Conroe, were released those old workstations had nothing going for them but inertia.
tyingq 5y ago
I follow your line of reasoning, but I think AMD had a much bigger role in killing off the various RISC architectures. Itanium felt much more like a sideline activity for those that didn't believe x86_64/Linux was going to be as big as it was. They viewed it as a sort of "toy infrastructure" until it was too late.
acje 5y ago
Itanium was a huge business success for anything AMD64. I think IA64 was too early and targeted the wrong market too be a success of its own. Also being a single source ISA is very unattractive. If the ISA had been open like RISC-V, and the target market was scale out servers and small computers rather than the nonexistent scale up HPC market and almost nonexistent scale up database market, things could have been very different. On the positive side maybe some open source ISA can emerge using EPIC type architecture now that the proprietary version is dead.
bcantrill 5y ago
I was at that Stanford lecture! Assuming it was the one that I attended, the Intel engineer was John Crawford, the lead architect of Merced -- and John Hennessy was absolutely annihilating him. I described attending that lecture in a Reddit AMA years ago [0]: In fact, allow me to tell a story: as a young engineer, I attended a talk at Stanford, by John Crawford, architect of the Itanium (then known as Merced). He was presenting a bunch of benchmarks that seemed... dubious. And while Merced kicked butt on Eight Queens, it was terrible on gcc (and everything else that looked vaguely real-world). Even as brash as I might have been (ahem), I wasn't about to say anything, but then some guy in the back of the room just got on Crawford on this. Crawford tried to shake him off, but the guy was just a badger, at one point saying "Doesn't this just willfully ignore everything we've learned about commercial workloads over the last decade?" At this point, I turned around -- who the hell was this guy?! -- and saw that it was none other than John Hennessy himself. A Silicon Valley gangland slaying if ever there was one -- and told me everything I (or anyone) needed to know about Itanium's fate. The room was packed (and open to non-Stanford students, which is how I got there); glad to know I wasn't the only one on whom this made an impact! [0] https://i.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_of_joyent_the_father_of_dtrace_and/cq3dm72/.compact https://i.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_of_...
- codesections 5y ago
  Did you tell this story on On the Metal? It sounds familiar, and I'm pretty sure I haven't looked at that AMA. (I hope the podcast comes back, by the way!)
  - bcantrill 5y ago
    Surely -- I have retold it many times over the years. And we're working on On the Metal! A combination of pandemic/resurgence + us being (very) heads down has delayed us, but stay tuned!
- throwaway9870 5y ago
  That sounds like the lecture I was at. Thanks for sharing that, fun times. There were some really great lectures back then. I remember when Exponential gave their talk right after Apple moved away from the PowerPC architecture. Everyone knew their processor was a dud in every commercial way (super high-power BiCMOS PowerPC chip), but almost felt sorry for the guy and were amazingly polite.
Hypx_ 5y ago
Though in hindsight a 64-bit version of x86 would’ve killed them all anyways. Had Intel invested money into that instead, they’d still win easily.
- grp000 5y ago
  Might be a case of sunk cost fallacy. The article mentions that while vendors were asking for 64 bit, they didn't want to cannibalize Itanium, but were forced to anyway when AMD came out with their 64 bit pentium compatible CPU.
cpleppert 5y ago
The competing unix manufacturers didn't need Itanium as an excuse to fold; they were completely non-competitive by the time the itanium came around. Customers didn't purchase a unix system because of the performance of the proprietary architecture but the entire ecosystem provided by manufacturers. DEC and its Alpha was on life support even though it was marginally more competitive against x86 precisely for this reason. The manufacturers that intended to switch to Itanium were either part of HP (compaq & dec) and would have thrown in the towel otherwise or were desperate to remain relevant (SGI). They could never had tried to compete itanium or no itanium. Itanium actually made no impact on the strongest competitors, SPARC and POWER. Not only did Intel lose billions on Itanium but it tied up development resources that couldn't be used against AMD and influenced the decision not to compete in the mobile space.
bsder 5y ago
> They didn't have an answer and I could see the look on John's face and at that point realized they might not understand what they are getting into. Ayup. The DEC guys cheered when Intel announced that Itanium would be VLIW. They knew that Intel was about to sink a huge amount of engineering effort into a dead end that would never work. Of course, nobody realized that all the business management chains were complete cowardly dipshits and that Intel spending a Gigabuck was sufficient to terrify them into completely abandoning the high-end market to Intel who milked it for years. So ... Itanic was a horrible engineering failure but a great business success.

jabl 5y ago

True, but the other side of the coin is that the massive economics of scale in chip manufacturing as well as around ISA ecosystems (software) meant that some massive consolidation of the industry was all but inevitable. Had Intel not embarked on the Itanium project, we might still have ended up with something close to the world we have now, with x86-64 and ARM being the top dogs, and some "traditional RISC workstation" architecture surviving in a small high-end niche (POWER).

throwaway9870 5y ago
No question there are a lot of ways to win, probably many better than what transpired. But in the end, Itanium played a big role in Intel consolidating the CPU market and taking complete control for a significant period of time.

nabla9 5y ago

Itanium was disappointing from the day one. Itanium never matched the performance of RISC or CISC competitors (POWER, SPARC, x86). HP replaced Alpha with Itanium but that was a costly mistake.

throwaway9870 5y ago
Alpha was DEC, HP had PA-RISC. I had a PA-RISC in my office and had to have facilities come and adjust air conditioning airflow because the computer put off so much heat.
- icedchai 5y ago
  They may have meant that HP acquired Compaq, which had acquired DEC. Itanium was a joint project between HP and Intel, IIRC.
- nabla9 5y ago
  HP had PA-RISC and Alpha. HP bought Compaq 2001, Compaq had bought DEC earlier.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Not all of them did. I have a 712 PA-RISC workstation and its CPU is passively cooled with a spring loaded tiny cooling block. They didn't even bother to use paste.
  - acomjean 5y ago
    I had a PA-RISC workstation too. No heat problems, but it wasn't particularly fast. But the "superdomes" (Refigerator sized computer in the very cold and loud server room....). It was weird, I worked on those superdome machines for years without seeing them. and only got to see them when they had to debug some of my serial port code (it turned out the cable was wired wrong...) HPUX had some really interesting Real Time Extensions. I was on a exploratory group for switching to Linux and scheduling control was going to be a problem (15 years ago...)

fatbird 5y ago

Your causality doesn't seem to line up. As you tell it, the workstation CPUs were already peaking in terms of complexity and cost, when Intel and HP announce a huge investment in the next generation of this class of CPU. This doesn't signal that the segment is economically unviable, and if you're an existing player with an existing strong design, it signals an opportunity to invest in your own next generation and meet Intel/HP head-on with a superior brand (for this segment) and a more plausible next-gen design. Intel and HP show up promising a clean sheet design in a decade doesn't seem like a time to roll up your market leading offering and go home.

jeffbee 5y ago
Nothing about this history lines up with facts. Intel killed the RISC workstation CPUs with the Pentium Pro, not with the Itanium. PRO/Engineer and SolidWorks had been ported to Windows NT at the very beginning of that operating system's availability, and the performance on x86 was already better than RISC workstations, at a tiny fraction of the cost, by late 1995.
- throwaway9870 5y ago
  The Pentium Pro and eventually the AMD64 chips equalled or bested the workstations on many tasks by the end of the 90's and early 2000s. But the Itanium processor distracted them from even competing. SGI for example had at least one high-end MIPS processor under development (iirc "the beast") and they stopped the project and later were trying to ship Itanium servers. HP threw the towel in and joined forces with Intel. Here is an article from 1999 on Sun booting SunOS on Itanium: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sun-boots-solaris-on-itanium-hardware-5000103621/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sun-boots-solaris-on-itanium-h... Compaq stopped making Alpha servers and switched to Itanium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha Itanium was a huge misdirection and distraction for everyone in the workstation business and basically put them in such a bad spot they failed to even compete with Intel x86 past 2000 or so in any real way.
cpleppert 5y ago
The Itanium wasn't just designed as a workstation CPU it was designed to be superior to existing high-end systems and then over time with volume be the eventual x86 replacement. The business case for itanium didn't work as a workstation cpu. >>Intel and HP show up promising a clean sheet design in a decade doesn't seem like a time to roll up your market leading offering and go home. They didn't roll up so much as have their existing market disappear. SGI, DEC and Compaq were dead. Sparc and Power gradually transitioned away from any workstation offering to servers.

mumblemumble 5y ago

Sort of the New Coke theory of CPUs. I like it. -- For anyone who wasn't there: In the 80s, Coca-Cola had lost its crown. Pepsi was the most popular soft drink, at least in the USA. Coca-Cola responded by changing their recipe, to great fanfare. It's often held up as one of American business's greatest failures. People hated New Coke, and later that year they brought back the old formula, under the name Coca-Cola Classic. I think that that summary of the story misses an important point, though. After the dust had settled. Coke had regained its crown, and has held it ever since. So, while New Coke itself failed on the market, the event's long-term influence on the company's financial outcomes was overwhelmingly positive. To the extent that some people have claimed that the whole thing was just an exceptionally clever PR stunt.

sneak 5y ago
FWIW, both New Coke and Coke "Classic" (aka new coke 1.1) both use high fructose corn syrup, which is substantially cheaper in the USA in industrial quantities due to huge tax-funded agricultural subsidies for corn (maize) farmers. These remain in place today (which is why everything in the US is sweetened with corn syrup instead of sugar). "Old coke", as well as what is now known as "mexican coke" in the USA, used/use sugar. New coke was the flag day for switching to a cheaper sweetener in the US market. When they switched "back" to coke "classic", they kept the new sweetener.
- lizknope 5y ago
  This article claims that Coca Cola switched to high fructose corn syrup in 1984 which was a year before the debut of New Coke https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/07/the-secret-history-of-why-soda-companies-switched-from-sugar-to-high-fructose-corn-syrup/ https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/07/the-secret-history-...
- creamytaco 5y ago
  When I first moved to USA from Denmark, back in the late 90s, the chemical, sickly syrupy taste of Coca Cola made me gag and I was very surprised in terms of how different it was from the European version. Then I found out that in Europe, they use sugar rather than corn syrup. It's amazing what the Americans will put up with.

pjc50 5y ago

Back in the day of 2001, I was working on the hugely cross-platform Zeus Web Server. It served the whole selection of UNIX platforms: https://web.archive.org/web/20011208194616/http://www.zeus.com/products/zws/tech_info/platform_supp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20011208194616/http://www.zeus.c... We certainly had an Itanium build as well, although it doesn't appear on that list, which suggests that it never sold. But it's notable how many of those platforms are effectively dead and only the open source ones on x86 are left standing - and OSX, which deliberately has no server platform. That era was when people were just starting to realise how much more cost-effective OSS+X86 was. That is what ate the server and workstation markets, especially once people started to horizontally scale and "the cloud" appeared. The only orgs left with the capacity to choose a new platform and make it cost-effective for the world are basically FAANG+M. And which one of them bought a fabless semi company full of RISC designers from all those dead instruction sets? Apple.

jandrese 5y ago
The article makes it sound like Itanium was some genius move on Intel's part to kill off the old workstation market, but IMHO that's exactly the opposite. This was Intel spending god knows how much money to jump into the workstation market right as it was suffering its final death throes from fatal wounding it took from the PC clone market. Sure those workstations were powerful and had impeccable engineering, but they also cost at least 5 times as much as a similarly powerful PC. Sometimes more a full order of magnitude more. Plus they were full of obnoxious licensing requirements, like making you purchase a compiler for thousands of dollars per year or requiring you to buy an obscenely overpriced support contract to get OS updates. They just couldn't complete with some cheap clone running Linux, especially as Intel poured way more money into R&D each year and overtook the workstation chips. By the time the Core architecture, and especially Conroe, were released those old workstations had nothing going for them but inertia.

tyingq 5y ago

I follow your line of reasoning, but I think AMD had a much bigger role in killing off the various RISC architectures. Itanium felt much more like a sideline activity for those that didn't believe x86_64/Linux was going to be as big as it was. They viewed it as a sort of "toy infrastructure" until it was too late.

acje 5y ago

Itanium was a huge business success for anything AMD64. I think IA64 was too early and targeted the wrong market too be a success of its own. Also being a single source ISA is very unattractive. If the ISA had been open like RISC-V, and the target market was scale out servers and small computers rather than the nonexistent scale up HPC market and almost nonexistent scale up database market, things could have been very different. On the positive side maybe some open source ISA can emerge using EPIC type architecture now that the proprietary version is dead.

bcantrill 5y ago

I was at that Stanford lecture! Assuming it was the one that I attended, the Intel engineer was John Crawford, the lead architect of Merced -- and John Hennessy was absolutely annihilating him. I described attending that lecture in a Reddit AMA years ago [0]: In fact, allow me to tell a story: as a young engineer, I attended a talk at Stanford, by John Crawford, architect of the Itanium (then known as Merced). He was presenting a bunch of benchmarks that seemed... dubious. And while Merced kicked butt on Eight Queens, it was terrible on gcc (and everything else that looked vaguely real-world). Even as brash as I might have been (ahem), I wasn't about to say anything, but then some guy in the back of the room just got on Crawford on this. Crawford tried to shake him off, but the guy was just a badger, at one point saying "Doesn't this just willfully ignore everything we've learned about commercial workloads over the last decade?" At this point, I turned around -- who the hell was this guy?! -- and saw that it was none other than John Hennessy himself. A Silicon Valley gangland slaying if ever there was one -- and told me everything I (or anyone) needed to know about Itanium's fate. The room was packed (and open to non-Stanford students, which is how I got there); glad to know I wasn't the only one on whom this made an impact! [0] https://i.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_of_joyent_the_father_of_dtrace_and/cq3dm72/.compact https://i.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_of_...

codesections 5y ago
Did you tell this story on On the Metal? It sounds familiar, and I'm pretty sure I haven't looked at that AMA. (I hope the podcast comes back, by the way!)
- bcantrill 5y ago
  Surely -- I have retold it many times over the years. And we're working on On the Metal! A combination of pandemic/resurgence + us being (very) heads down has delayed us, but stay tuned!
throwaway9870 5y ago
That sounds like the lecture I was at. Thanks for sharing that, fun times. There were some really great lectures back then. I remember when Exponential gave their talk right after Apple moved away from the PowerPC architecture. Everyone knew their processor was a dud in every commercial way (super high-power BiCMOS PowerPC chip), but almost felt sorry for the guy and were amazingly polite.

Hypx_ 5y ago

Though in hindsight a 64-bit version of x86 would’ve killed them all anyways. Had Intel invested money into that instead, they’d still win easily.

grp000 5y ago
Might be a case of sunk cost fallacy. The article mentions that while vendors were asking for 64 bit, they didn't want to cannibalize Itanium, but were forced to anyway when AMD came out with their 64 bit pentium compatible CPU.

cpleppert 5y ago

The competing unix manufacturers didn't need Itanium as an excuse to fold; they were completely non-competitive by the time the itanium came around. Customers didn't purchase a unix system because of the performance of the proprietary architecture but the entire ecosystem provided by manufacturers. DEC and its Alpha was on life support even though it was marginally more competitive against x86 precisely for this reason. The manufacturers that intended to switch to Itanium were either part of HP (compaq & dec) and would have thrown in the towel otherwise or were desperate to remain relevant (SGI). They could never had tried to compete itanium or no itanium. Itanium actually made no impact on the strongest competitors, SPARC and POWER. Not only did Intel lose billions on Itanium but it tied up development resources that couldn't be used against AMD and influenced the decision not to compete in the mobile space.

bsder 5y ago

> They didn't have an answer and I could see the look on John's face and at that point realized they might not understand what they are getting into. Ayup. The DEC guys cheered when Intel announced that Itanium would be VLIW. They knew that Intel was about to sink a huge amount of engineering effort into a dead end that would never work. Of course, nobody realized that all the business management chains were complete cowardly dipshits and that Intel spending a Gigabuck was sufficient to terrify them into completely abandoning the high-end market to Intel who milked it for years. So ... Itanic was a horrible engineering failure but a great business success.