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Thanks, I wasn't aware of the iAPX 432! Funny that history repeated itself almost exactly 20 years later, when Intel introduced the 64 bit Itanium architecture,

by rob74 4y ago

Thanks, I wasn't aware of the iAPX 432! Funny that history repeated itself almost exactly 20 years later, when Intel introduced the 64 bit Itanium architecture, but eventually had to copy AMD's 64 bit extension of the x86 architecture because x86 just refused to die. And today, 40 years later, it's still around - although maybe Apple's efforts will finally manage to put a stake through its shriveled heart...

sliken 4y ago
Heh, refused to die seems like a weird way to state it. Intel tried to force a split in desktop/server design with a significant price premium and shipped a very complicated CPU that moved significant complexity/work into the compiler. It managed to scare Alpha, Mips, and PA-risc out of the market, and generally shipped years late and hit performance milestones even later. AMD on the other hand doubled the x86's registers, added 64 bit support, improved performance and did so with basically zero increase in cost. So suddenly a random x86-64, even a desktop, could gasp make full use of over 4GB ram at zero cost. So Itanium retreated from servers, to HPC, to enterprise, and HA enterprise then of course died.