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Multiflow folded in early '90 but then in 1994 HP and Intel bet their futures on this? Convex (using HP PA-RISC no less, defeated Multiflow but HP still thought
by gregw2 3y ago
Multiflow folded in early '90 but then in 1994 HP and Intel bet their futures on this? Convex (using HP PA-RISC no less, defeated Multiflow but HP still thought they could make it work? What was the nature of HP's misjudgement? They must have had a theory why Multiflow failed but they would succeed, no?
I recall there was new research coming out of University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign that breathed new hope into this but would be curious why HP+Intel pursued it if Multiflow failed. I do recall HP brought a compiler team to the table and per wikipedia they had a research team working on VLIW since 1989. HP has an internal bakeoff of RISC vs VLIW but did it not capture the compiler challenges or workloads properly?
Strategy wise, for a vendor (HP) looking to phase out their RISC investments while maintaining some degree of backwards compatibility and becoming first among equals of their RISC peers partnering with the market volume leader Intel it made great sense... but that only works if the technology pans out. Did HP management get seduced by a competitive strategic play and make a poor engineering/technical call? Or did the internal research team oversell itself even knowing about Multiflow? Or was it something else? Hindsight is 20/20 but what key assumption(s) went wrong that we can all learn from?