5 ms·

Itanium can be regarded as a huge success. Maybe some don't remember, but the minicomputers and unices were where all the money was. Sure, Intel had the process

Itanium can be regarded as a huge success. Maybe some don't remember, but the minicomputers and unices were where all the money was. Sure, Intel had the process edge, and had completely cornered the microcomputer market. But PCs had slim margins and didn't really matter in the bigger scope important data processing. Many of the computer nerds watched in awe as vendor after vendor dropped their hugely expensive and engineering heavy custom CPU architectures and lined up behind Intel. IBM was the only big player who didn't swallow the bait. "Even if they fail, that's a huge success" was a common observation at the time. And sure enough. I don't think they failed on purpose, but business wise it was a win-win situation. The x86 architecture would have won anyway, because of the sheer scale, but the Itanium wreckage hastened it. Everyone needed to move, so why not move to x86/Linux directly?

andromeduck 4y ago
Comment I saw on YouTube a while back: > In some ways Itanium was the most successful bluff every played in the tech industry. In much the same way that Reagan's Star Wars bankrupted the Soviet Union got almost every single competitor to fold. Back at the beginning of the project, Intel was nowhere in high-end & 64-bit computing. There was HP (PA- RISC), Sun (Sparc), Dec (Alpha), IBM (Power), MIPS (SGI). Intel wisely picked the partner with the stupidest management (Carly) to give up their competitive edge and announce to analysts that Intel's vision/roadmap is so awesome that RISC is dead and that they're going to follow the bidding of their master Intel for their 64-bit plan. Wall Street bought in to the story so much that almost everyone else with competitive chips folded their strong hands to Itanium's bluff - SGI spun off MIPS and MIPS decided to leave the high-end space. Compaq undervalued Alpha and let it die. Sun tried to become a software company and if it weren't for Fujitsu making modern sparcs, sparc would be dead. > Basically, with nothing but PR and Carly's stupidity, Intel wiped out over half of the high-end computing processor market. > Thankfully AMD had the vision to see through the bluff, and saw the opportunity for 64-bit computing that worked; and thankfully IBM didn't have someone like Carly around so they saw the value in retaining competitive advantages; or the computing world would be pretty bleak place right now..
- xorcist 4y ago
  The comparison to star wars is certainly apt. It doesn't need to work, in the engineering sense, to be useful. Sometimes economics can trump engineering. An important part of the PR machinery was that by picking up a hot topic from academia, they really got absolutely everyone to talk about VLIW as the next genreration RISC. And everyone already knew that RISC was superior and x86 was a toy, but which also was mostly true at time. In the end, what won was huge caches and huge OoO pipelines. Linus Torvalds had some strong opinions and well known opinions on this, which turned out to be mostly right.
- neilv 4y ago
  For anyone who doesn't know but is curious, "Carly" refers to Hewlett Packard (HP) CEO Carly Fiorina. Fiorina oversaw HP's acquisition of Compaq, which had previously acquired DEC, IIRC. Reportedly, the HP-Compaq acquisition was opposed by many, including board members and family. (This was before my time, but I read a lot of trade rags as a kid, and then later occasionally heard insider stories.) HP was legendary for culture, like "management by walking around, and talking to the people on the ground", which was different from Fiorina's style. Compaq was the most noteworthy IBM-compatible PC company, before Dell's dorm room dirt-cheap generic PC clones business skyrocketed into an empire. DEC was the maker of the PDPs and VAX-based minicomputers on which much of the field of Computer Science was arguably developed, and later MIPS- and then Alpha-based workstations and servers, while also still developing VAXen (the plural form of the word). All those proprietary CPU ISAs listed (PA-RISC, SPARC, Alpha, POWER), when they were introduced on engineering/graphics workstation computers, were especially exciting, because -- separate from the technical architecture itself -- they would briefly probably be the fastest workstation in your shop. All of these made MS-DOS/Windows PCs and Macs look like toys by comparison (though, eventually, Windows NT 3.51 started to be semi-credible if you just needed to run a single big-ticket application program). And you didn't know what exciting new development would be next. Maybe it was like if, today, several makers of top-end gaming GPUs resulted in a leapfrogging on a cadence of every few/several months. And if they had different strengths, and, incidentally, curious exclusive game software to explore. Or like the very recent succession of Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, etc., and wondering what the next big wow will be, what they've done with it, and what you can do with it. When I knew some Linux developers working on Itanium, some were already calling it "Itanic". (I didn't read much into the name at the time, because were a lot of joke derogatory names for brands and technologies.) Later, I thought "Itanic" was because it was a huge expensive thing that was doomed to sink. The theory in the TFA sounds like most competing ship companies gave up on their own engine designs when they heard how great the Titanic would be.
jojobas 4y ago
Doesn't quite add up. SGI folded their CPUs (thanks Mr Belluzzo) before Itanium was even released, Sun offered their x86 server about the same time (and kept their SPARCs). HP was the only casualty to Itanium, but that was self-inflicted.
- inkyoto 4y ago
  To be completely honest, MIPS CPU's had never been known for their speed – not until the release of the 64-bit MIPS architecture anyway when they finally became competitive with other RISC CPU's, but it was a complete ISA redesign. Sun was in a somewhat similar boat with the SPARC v8 architecture, and they were rather late with UltraSPARC (SPARC v9 ISA). Yet, they managed to hold out longer due to having a switched memory controller and a very wide memory bus, which allowed them to become the best hardware appliance to run the Oracle database (despite being less performant), and divert the cash flow into the UltraSPARC development. UltraSPARC I was underwhelming, and with UltraSPARC II they finally caught up with other RISC vendors and gradually started outperforming some (e.g. MIPS) in some areas. Amusingly, the 512-bit wide memory bus has made a comeback in Apple M1 Max laptops (laptops!), and M1 Ultra has a 1024-bit wide memory bus. Why HP went all in with ditching their own perfectly fine PA-RISC 2.0 architecture is an enigma to me tho.
  - jojobas 4y ago
    > Why HP went all in with ditching their own perfectly fine PA-RISC 2.0 architecture Again, thanks Rick Belluzzo.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > To be completely honest, MIPS CPU's had never been known for their speed SPEC would like to dissagree with you.
    - jojobas 4y ago
      He has MIPS as not known for their speed and SPARC getting ahead as a major achievement in the same post.
bell-cot 4y ago
> ...can be regarded as a huge success... So long as one puts big, fat "giga-money-losing" and "humiliating" disclaimers on "success", then yes. Vs. - what if, instead of Itanium, Intel had more-quietly designed and delivered good, high-performance x86-64 CPU's? I'm thinking that, by bottom-line metrics, would have been a vastly more successful business strategy.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  Well, that's what AMD was doing. Intel's pride couldn't let them legitimize that strategy. Meanwhile, ARM was designing little low-power RISC toys that were obviously no danger to Intel at all.
  - detaro 4y ago
    Itanium was announced (and supposed to have shipped!) well before AMD announced x86-64
    - bell-cot 4y ago
      THIS. Per Wikipedia: "AMD originally announced AMD64 in 1999[14] with a full specification available in August 2000" vs. "In June 1994 Intel and HP announced their joint effort to make a new ISA..."
acdha 4y ago
It was a humiliating failure, not a success. The trend against those other architectures was already clear: as processor complexity went up, the costs of building them skyrocketed and most of those companies had no plan for the kind of volume you’d need to support them. Don’t forget that applied on both the hardware and software sides: a competitive compiler and optimized libraries were important. This is why Itanium got traction: everyone knew that you needed volume to stay in the game. IBM had a strategy to get that with Apple & Motorola (PowerPC started in 1991), but HP did not have anything like that for PA-RISC. DEC might have gotten there if they’d had a more aggressive partner for the lower-end Alpha strategy but the merger killed any chance of that. Since x86 was rising so fast, it might not be clear why Intel got involved. That goes back to the licensing rights: they couldn’t prevent companies like AMD from competing directly with them. Itanium was the attempt to close off that line of competition legally and they were willing to attack their own product margins to do it.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I never got anyone from Intel to actually admit to the licensing angle but it was pretty widely speculated about at the time.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Good point. I don’t have any inside information but it was certainly common to characterize it as a long reaction to things like losing that 386 lawsuit.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Yeah. Whether or not everyone was smart enough to never actually write down such a thing in an email or memo, you know there were execs who were keenly aware of this and, even if not the deciding factor, presumably helped influence the decision.

andromeduck 4y ago

Comment I saw on YouTube a while back: > In some ways Itanium was the most successful bluff every played in the tech industry. In much the same way that Reagan's Star Wars bankrupted the Soviet Union got almost every single competitor to fold. Back at the beginning of the project, Intel was nowhere in high-end & 64-bit computing. There was HP (PA- RISC), Sun (Sparc), Dec (Alpha), IBM (Power), MIPS (SGI). Intel wisely picked the partner with the stupidest management (Carly) to give up their competitive edge and announce to analysts that Intel's vision/roadmap is so awesome that RISC is dead and that they're going to follow the bidding of their master Intel for their 64-bit plan. Wall Street bought in to the story so much that almost everyone else with competitive chips folded their strong hands to Itanium's bluff - SGI spun off MIPS and MIPS decided to leave the high-end space. Compaq undervalued Alpha and let it die. Sun tried to become a software company and if it weren't for Fujitsu making modern sparcs, sparc would be dead. > Basically, with nothing but PR and Carly's stupidity, Intel wiped out over half of the high-end computing processor market. > Thankfully AMD had the vision to see through the bluff, and saw the opportunity for 64-bit computing that worked; and thankfully IBM didn't have someone like Carly around so they saw the value in retaining competitive advantages; or the computing world would be pretty bleak place right now..

xorcist 4y ago
The comparison to star wars is certainly apt. It doesn't need to work, in the engineering sense, to be useful. Sometimes economics can trump engineering. An important part of the PR machinery was that by picking up a hot topic from academia, they really got absolutely everyone to talk about VLIW as the next genreration RISC. And everyone already knew that RISC was superior and x86 was a toy, but which also was mostly true at time. In the end, what won was huge caches and huge OoO pipelines. Linus Torvalds had some strong opinions and well known opinions on this, which turned out to be mostly right.
neilv 4y ago
For anyone who doesn't know but is curious, "Carly" refers to Hewlett Packard (HP) CEO Carly Fiorina. Fiorina oversaw HP's acquisition of Compaq, which had previously acquired DEC, IIRC. Reportedly, the HP-Compaq acquisition was opposed by many, including board members and family. (This was before my time, but I read a lot of trade rags as a kid, and then later occasionally heard insider stories.) HP was legendary for culture, like "management by walking around, and talking to the people on the ground", which was different from Fiorina's style. Compaq was the most noteworthy IBM-compatible PC company, before Dell's dorm room dirt-cheap generic PC clones business skyrocketed into an empire. DEC was the maker of the PDPs and VAX-based minicomputers on which much of the field of Computer Science was arguably developed, and later MIPS- and then Alpha-based workstations and servers, while also still developing VAXen (the plural form of the word). All those proprietary CPU ISAs listed (PA-RISC, SPARC, Alpha, POWER), when they were introduced on engineering/graphics workstation computers, were especially exciting, because -- separate from the technical architecture itself -- they would briefly probably be the fastest workstation in your shop. All of these made MS-DOS/Windows PCs and Macs look like toys by comparison (though, eventually, Windows NT 3.51 started to be semi-credible if you just needed to run a single big-ticket application program). And you didn't know what exciting new development would be next. Maybe it was like if, today, several makers of top-end gaming GPUs resulted in a leapfrogging on a cadence of every few/several months. And if they had different strengths, and, incidentally, curious exclusive game software to explore. Or like the very recent succession of Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, etc., and wondering what the next big wow will be, what they've done with it, and what you can do with it. When I knew some Linux developers working on Itanium, some were already calling it "Itanic". (I didn't read much into the name at the time, because were a lot of joke derogatory names for brands and technologies.) Later, I thought "Itanic" was because it was a huge expensive thing that was doomed to sink. The theory in the TFA sounds like most competing ship companies gave up on their own engine designs when they heard how great the Titanic would be.

jojobas 4y ago

Doesn't quite add up. SGI folded their CPUs (thanks Mr Belluzzo) before Itanium was even released, Sun offered their x86 server about the same time (and kept their SPARCs). HP was the only casualty to Itanium, but that was self-inflicted.

inkyoto 4y ago
To be completely honest, MIPS CPU's had never been known for their speed – not until the release of the 64-bit MIPS architecture anyway when they finally became competitive with other RISC CPU's, but it was a complete ISA redesign. Sun was in a somewhat similar boat with the SPARC v8 architecture, and they were rather late with UltraSPARC (SPARC v9 ISA). Yet, they managed to hold out longer due to having a switched memory controller and a very wide memory bus, which allowed them to become the best hardware appliance to run the Oracle database (despite being less performant), and divert the cash flow into the UltraSPARC development. UltraSPARC I was underwhelming, and with UltraSPARC II they finally caught up with other RISC vendors and gradually started outperforming some (e.g. MIPS) in some areas. Amusingly, the 512-bit wide memory bus has made a comeback in Apple M1 Max laptops (laptops!), and M1 Ultra has a 1024-bit wide memory bus. Why HP went all in with ditching their own perfectly fine PA-RISC 2.0 architecture is an enigma to me tho.
- jojobas 4y ago
  > Why HP went all in with ditching their own perfectly fine PA-RISC 2.0 architecture Again, thanks Rick Belluzzo.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > To be completely honest, MIPS CPU's had never been known for their speed SPEC would like to dissagree with you.
  - jojobas 4y ago
    He has MIPS as not known for their speed and SPARC getting ahead as a major achievement in the same post.

bell-cot 4y ago

> ...can be regarded as a huge success... So long as one puts big, fat "giga-money-losing" and "humiliating" disclaimers on "success", then yes. Vs. - what if, instead of Itanium, Intel had more-quietly designed and delivered good, high-performance x86-64 CPU's? I'm thinking that, by bottom-line metrics, would have been a vastly more successful business strategy.

dsr_ 4y ago
Well, that's what AMD was doing. Intel's pride couldn't let them legitimize that strategy. Meanwhile, ARM was designing little low-power RISC toys that were obviously no danger to Intel at all.
- detaro 4y ago
  Itanium was announced (and supposed to have shipped!) well before AMD announced x86-64
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    THIS. Per Wikipedia: "AMD originally announced AMD64 in 1999[14] with a full specification available in August 2000" vs. "In June 1994 Intel and HP announced their joint effort to make a new ISA..."

acdha 4y ago

It was a humiliating failure, not a success. The trend against those other architectures was already clear: as processor complexity went up, the costs of building them skyrocketed and most of those companies had no plan for the kind of volume you’d need to support them. Don’t forget that applied on both the hardware and software sides: a competitive compiler and optimized libraries were important. This is why Itanium got traction: everyone knew that you needed volume to stay in the game. IBM had a strategy to get that with Apple & Motorola (PowerPC started in 1991), but HP did not have anything like that for PA-RISC. DEC might have gotten there if they’d had a more aggressive partner for the lower-end Alpha strategy but the merger killed any chance of that. Since x86 was rising so fast, it might not be clear why Intel got involved. That goes back to the licensing rights: they couldn’t prevent companies like AMD from competing directly with them. Itanium was the attempt to close off that line of competition legally and they were willing to attack their own product margins to do it.

ghaff 4y ago
I never got anyone from Intel to actually admit to the licensing angle but it was pretty widely speculated about at the time.
- acdha 4y ago
  Good point. I don’t have any inside information but it was certainly common to characterize it as a long reaction to things like losing that 386 lawsuit.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Yeah. Whether or not everyone was smart enough to never actually write down such a thing in an email or memo, you know there were execs who were keenly aware of this and, even if not the deciding factor, presumably helped influence the decision.