4 ms·

You think Itanium was entirely successful? Really? Plus I think you've overlooked AMD if you think they killed off all the competition.

mepian 4y ago
It was indeed successful at killing PA-RISC, high-end MIPS, and Alpha, because their owners (HP, SGI, Compaq) abandoned them for Itanium.
- klelatti 4y ago
  You think Itanium was entirely successful then? My point is that it doesn't matter how good the architecture is or if a few firms follow you - you need it to be successful in the market. If you think Itanium was a cunning plan to take a few competitors out of the market only to abandon a few years later then we'll have to disagree.
  - xorcist 4y ago
    Itanium was absolutely a plan to take out the competitors in the unix- and minicomputer market, where margins were much, much higher than in the generic x86 market. That worked. SGI, Digital, HP, Compaq/Tandem, they all fell. It was not necessarily the plan to abandon the architecture, but once it was won, it also wasn't terribly important to keep going. Much like most corporate takeovers to this day. Intel would have been happy to keep the market segmented for a few more years, but what happened instead was that the market vacuum was filled by Linux and x86 instead. That would likely have happened sooner or later anyway, but there you go.
    - klelatti 4y ago
      Correlation is not causation.
pjmlp 4y ago
Itanium only failed because AMD exists, with patent agreements that allowed them to create AMD64.
- temac 4y ago
  It was a poor architecture though and if not by AMD64 it would have been killed by something else more in line with traditionnal high perf superscalar. Maybe even just Arm.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Underestimating Wintel mighty. ARM was meaningless during those days.
- monocasa 4y ago
  PowerPC probably would have eaten it's lunch. There was even a dual x86/PowerPC chip called the PowerPC 615.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    It was hardly successful outside Apple, and IBM systems, not sure.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      Even Microsoft directly shipped a PowerPC system running a modified NT kernel in the Xbox 360. If Itanium continued to implode with no other alternatives, PowerPC would have been the most likely to pick up the slack. The main reason why it more or less failed was from a lack of volume to pay for leading edge R&D for the process side. Without AMD64, Intel's Itanium obsession combined with the mid aughts dennard scaling wall catching everyone with their pants down would have given a nice bit of breathing room for PowerPC to exceed x86-32.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        That Windows version was long gone when Itanium came to be, no way Microsoft would bring Windows NT for Power PC from the dead. https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/windows-nt-powerpc-no-more https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/windows-nt-powerpc-no-...

mepian 4y ago

It was indeed successful at killing PA-RISC, high-end MIPS, and Alpha, because their owners (HP, SGI, Compaq) abandoned them for Itanium.

klelatti 4y ago
You think Itanium was entirely successful then? My point is that it doesn't matter how good the architecture is or if a few firms follow you - you need it to be successful in the market. If you think Itanium was a cunning plan to take a few competitors out of the market only to abandon a few years later then we'll have to disagree.
- xorcist 4y ago
  Itanium was absolutely a plan to take out the competitors in the unix- and minicomputer market, where margins were much, much higher than in the generic x86 market. That worked. SGI, Digital, HP, Compaq/Tandem, they all fell. It was not necessarily the plan to abandon the architecture, but once it was won, it also wasn't terribly important to keep going. Much like most corporate takeovers to this day. Intel would have been happy to keep the market segmented for a few more years, but what happened instead was that the market vacuum was filled by Linux and x86 instead. That would likely have happened sooner or later anyway, but there you go.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    Correlation is not causation.

pjmlp 4y ago

Itanium only failed because AMD exists, with patent agreements that allowed them to create AMD64.

temac 4y ago
It was a poor architecture though and if not by AMD64 it would have been killed by something else more in line with traditionnal high perf superscalar. Maybe even just Arm.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Underestimating Wintel mighty. ARM was meaningless during those days.
monocasa 4y ago
PowerPC probably would have eaten it's lunch. There was even a dual x86/PowerPC chip called the PowerPC 615.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  It was hardly successful outside Apple, and IBM systems, not sure.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    Even Microsoft directly shipped a PowerPC system running a modified NT kernel in the Xbox 360. If Itanium continued to implode with no other alternatives, PowerPC would have been the most likely to pick up the slack. The main reason why it more or less failed was from a lack of volume to pay for leading edge R&D for the process side. Without AMD64, Intel's Itanium obsession combined with the mid aughts dennard scaling wall catching everyone with their pants down would have given a nice bit of breathing room for PowerPC to exceed x86-32.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      That Windows version was long gone when Itanium came to be, no way Microsoft would bring Windows NT for Power PC from the dead. https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/windows-nt-powerpc-no-more https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/windows-nt-powerpc-no-...