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> "It also fails to mention how thoroughly Intel wiped the floor with competitors in the "Workstation" space who had their own RISC flavors and mostly went out
by pavlov 3y ago
> "It also fails to mention how thoroughly Intel wiped the floor with competitors in the "Workstation" space who had their own RISC flavors and mostly went out of business with the exception of IBM's PowerPC."
Intel's own product in this space was Itanium which also went out of business.
- PaulHoule 3y agoThe astonishing thing about Intel's history was how much happened by accident. In the 1980s they thought the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 were the future. This chip, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80286 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80286 which could have been vastly more useful than it was with tiny changes, was a big hit instead. Itanium though had fundamental problems with how it was built and couldn't have been saved with any amount of investment; explicit parallelism just doesn't work for ordinary kinds of code because the compiler never knows which data is in the cache except for special applications like DSP. Itanium certainly seduced a number of those workstation vendors to give up on architectures that could have had a future and invest in one that didn't.
- actionfromafar 3y agoI think we are just now starting to have the software maturity to handle something like Itanium. We have toolchains with data flow analysis, languages other than C which could hint the instruction scheduler, we have profiling, we can gather profiling from not just a developers workbench but with instrumentation and we have Machine Learning to eke out patterns. But back then, Intel vastly overestimated the capabilities of the software world to take their tech and run with it.