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When I read about Itanium and iAPX 432, I can't help but think that Intel _isn't good at what they do_ and just lucked into he PC market by being cheap, and the

When I read about Itanium and iAPX 432, I can't help but think that Intel _isn't good at what they do_ and just lucked into he PC market by being cheap, and then riding to coattails of the Windows monopoly. I can't wait for ARM to eat their lunch. And dinner.

jmyeet 3y ago
When you read now or when you read at the time? I'm curious because context matters. Back in the 1990s when all this kicked off there was still a strong believe that RISC (vs CISC) was the future. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence to support this, most notably that the workstation and server spaces were dominated by RISC chips like Sparc, Alpha and MIPS. I do believe that whoever drove the Centrino movement (from mobile originally to desktop) saved the company. They laid the foundation for Intel's next 15 years of success. The original licensing agreement with AMD is an interesting part of Intel history too. Were that to happen today, it would probably be viewed as a disaster. In our modern era of short term corporate decision-making, it would probably be viewed negatively too. But it led to Intel's complete dominance thanks to x86 for decades. It killed pretty much every other architecture (other than ARM). It's only in the last 5-10 years that dominance has really wavered. Intel's big strength had always been their ability to fab chips at scale with low failure rate so the parts were hugely profitable. For decades the likes of AMD just didn't have that manufacturing capacity at the same scale and price. Intel led die-shrinking that was a huge driver to profits. It's only when they tried to move to 10nm that it all fell apart. Now TSMC has eaten their lunch. Intel is at risk of moving from being a first-party designer and fab of chips to producing third-party chips. If someone woke up from a 20 year coma and you told them about Intel's market position and fate they would be shocked. That's how big of a fall from grace it's been. But that's largely on the fab side, not the design side. Only recently has the Core architecture really hit its limit where Intel CPUs consume too much power and run too hot to eke out the last ounce of power. Itanium was a joint venture betwen HP and Intel. We can certainly look back now and say it was bad. I'm not convinced that determination was as easy at the time although it did have its critics.
javitron 3y ago
Intel has some of the best architecture and design teams in the industry. They have had failed products, no doubt. But I don't think you understand also how insanely good at execution Intel was during the 80s and 90s.

jmyeet 3y ago

When you read now or when you read at the time? I'm curious because context matters. Back in the 1990s when all this kicked off there was still a strong believe that RISC (vs CISC) was the future. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence to support this, most notably that the workstation and server spaces were dominated by RISC chips like Sparc, Alpha and MIPS. I do believe that whoever drove the Centrino movement (from mobile originally to desktop) saved the company. They laid the foundation for Intel's next 15 years of success. The original licensing agreement with AMD is an interesting part of Intel history too. Were that to happen today, it would probably be viewed as a disaster. In our modern era of short term corporate decision-making, it would probably be viewed negatively too. But it led to Intel's complete dominance thanks to x86 for decades. It killed pretty much every other architecture (other than ARM). It's only in the last 5-10 years that dominance has really wavered. Intel's big strength had always been their ability to fab chips at scale with low failure rate so the parts were hugely profitable. For decades the likes of AMD just didn't have that manufacturing capacity at the same scale and price. Intel led die-shrinking that was a huge driver to profits. It's only when they tried to move to 10nm that it all fell apart. Now TSMC has eaten their lunch. Intel is at risk of moving from being a first-party designer and fab of chips to producing third-party chips. If someone woke up from a 20 year coma and you told them about Intel's market position and fate they would be shocked. That's how big of a fall from grace it's been. But that's largely on the fab side, not the design side. Only recently has the Core architecture really hit its limit where Intel CPUs consume too much power and run too hot to eke out the last ounce of power. Itanium was a joint venture betwen HP and Intel. We can certainly look back now and say it was bad. I'm not convinced that determination was as easy at the time although it did have its critics.

javitron 3y ago

Intel has some of the best architecture and design teams in the industry. They have had failed products, no doubt. But I don't think you understand also how insanely good at execution Intel was during the 80s and 90s.