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What a fun rabbit hole to tumble down! Whenever the Itanium vs. AMD64 history comes up, I wonder what Intel’s roadmap for “consumer” IA64 looked like before AM
by twoodfin 5y ago
What a fun rabbit hole to tumble down!
Whenever the Itanium vs. AMD64 history comes up, I wonder what Intel’s roadmap for “consumer” IA64 looked like before AMD’s success made it obsolete.
Retellings like this imply Intel fully intended to replace x86 with Itanium, but I’ve never seen a hint as to how they saw that playing out.
- richard_todd 5y agoItanium had x86 emulation in hardware, so I think the model was to transition via emulation. But, as far as I know, it wasn’t very performant, and then AMD nailed the coffin shut a few years later with their 64-but architecture.
- bombcar 5y agoI suspect they saw it happening as we now see it happening for Apple on Mac - i64 would rule the servers and high-end hardware while people used x32 on "personal" machines until such time as i64 was cheap enough and fast enough to emulate x32 for home machines. I believe it was even touted as being able to do that - and the major vendors would recompile pretty quickly at that point. If only they had been able to convince Microsoft to not release for AMD64 the world might have been extremely different ...