4 ms·
Sure, but 64-bit x86 did materialize and killed Itanium, there is little reason to think it wouldn't have killed those archs too.
by u320 3y ago
Sure, but 64-bit x86 did materialize and killed Itanium, there is little reason to think it wouldn't have killed those archs too.
- bell-cot 3y agoMaybe...but Itanium was a join announcement by A-listers Intel and HP in June '94. Vs. C-lister AMD didn't announce x86-64 until 1999, didn't release the full spec. until Aug'00, and didn't ship an actual product until Apr'03. Without Itanium, those other architectures could easily have had an extra decade or more, and things might have turned out quite differently.
- monocasa 3y agoMaybe, maybe not. I'd argue what really killed Itanium was the end of dennard scaling. The whole arch was based on clocking faster and faster rather than being a slower, but smarter core. The end of dennard scaling put a ~5GHz cap on CPU speeds, is it's whole value prop didn't make sense against smarter cores that clocked just as high. IMO, on the technical merits, a lot of those dead archs are just as valid ISAs for slower, smarter cores as x64 is and would have been able to compete. PowerPC and AArch64 are pretty damn comparable.