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> There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much - it happens too often for anyone to call it wrong. It isn't clear what was pred

> There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much - it happens too often for anyone to call it wrong. It isn't clear what was predicted, but marketing should have predicted a range of units sold (and various price points having different predicted ranges!). Shout out to the Itanium sales forecast: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_edit.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...

c-linkage 1y ago
Holy cow was that forecast bad! It reminds me of a meeting long ago where the marketing team reported that oil was going to hit $400/bbl and that this would be great for business. I literally laughed out loud. At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no one could afford to move anything except by ox cart.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  > At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no one could afford to move anything except by ox cart. Just for some rough math here - I’m currently paying around $1.20/L for gas, and crude oil cost is roughly half of that, so if crude went up by 6x, I’d be looking at $5/L for gas. Gas is currently about 20% of my per-km cost of driving, so that price increase at the pump would increase my per-km cost by about 60%. FWIW that’s roughly the same per-km cost increase that people have voluntarily taken on over the past decade in North America by buying more expensive cars. (Though this does apply to personal transportation only, the math on e.g. transport trucks is different)
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    > by buying more expensive cars Not to mention less efficient cars.
    - sheepscreek 1y ago
      Not to mention, cars.
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    The issue isn't person transport it is shipping and home heating and agriculture I drive electric so like to imagine myself sheltered from gas price increases but I know grocery costs would explode
    - andrew_lettuce 1y ago
      Especially if you live were gas cost a buck twenty a liter
      - Marsymars 1y ago
        Well it's that high because of taxes, so if crude goes up the total price will go up proportionally less than places that have more of the gas cost comprised of non-taxes. (Some of the taxes are flat, and some get waived when gas gets expensive.)
  - andrew_lettuce 1y ago
    How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price? The economics are incredibly complex and murky, and the price of gas doesn't move with any sort of linear relation to crude except in very long timeframes. Regional refining capacity is way more important.
    - Marsymars 1y ago
      > How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price? I googled for a couple sources on the breakdown of the price of gasoline, and they seemed to be in agreement that the raw cost of crude is somewhere around half. (And broke refining out separately.) I'm sure it's not perfect, but it seems fairly reasonable. (And it can be off by quite a lot and still not make a huge difference to the cost-per-km of driving.)
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      > How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price? Look at gas prices in your area. Look at the price of crude. Divide. How could you possibly not be able to estimate the fraction? And yeah ideally you use an average number over some months and you sample the crude earlier than the gas but those are minor tweaks.
      - Macha 1y ago
        That's assuming the other costs (refining energy costs, transport, the company's gross margin) are uncorrelated to the price of crude oil, which seems unlikely
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        A) Just calculating the percentage doesn't assume that. B) They shouldn't correlate by a particularly large amount in a competitive environment. For an approximation as rough as "half" and assuming no other changes it's not a big deal.
    - Hojojo 1y ago
      The price of gas isn't immediately and directly impacted by the price of crude because of futures contracts. This naturally means gas prices will move to match the price of crude over time. It's a feature of the current system, not an indication that the price of gas isn't heavily reliant on gas. Nobody is making gas with spot prices.
wmf 1y ago
The plan was to artificially suppress x86-64 to leave customers with no real alternative to Itanium. The early sales projections made sense under that assumption.
- saghm 1y ago
  I had heard that it wasn't suppression as much as just not making it a thing at all, and that AMD used the opportunity to extend x86 to 64-bit, and Intel was essentially forced to follow suit to avoid losing more of the market. It also explains why the shorthand "amd64" is used; Intel didn't actually design x86_64 itself.
  - monocasa 1y ago
    There was apparently earlier Pentium 4s that supported some version of a 64bit isa, support for which was fused off before sending to customers in order to convince people to move to Itanium. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/former-intel-cpu-details-how-internal-x86-64-efforts-were-suppressed-prior-to-amd64s-success https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/former-intel...
    - chasil 1y ago
      I have some very old servers that have the Pentium 4 architecture with amd64 capability.
      - fuzzfactor 1y ago
        I've still got a couple small business models along these lines that are over 20 years old now. Still running possibly because I always turn them fully off when not using them. No hibernation, sleep or other monkey business. One Dell has an early 64-bit mainboard but only a 32-bit CPU in that socket, just fine for Windows XP and will also run W10 32-bit (slowly), mainly dual booting to Debian i386 now since it retired from office work. Puts out so much heat I would imagine there is a lot of bypassed silicon on the chip drawing power but not helping process. IIRC a 64-bit CPU for that socket was known to exist but was more or less "unobtanium". Then a trusty HP tower with the Pentium D, which was supposedly a "double" with two x86 arch patterns on the same chip. This one runs everything x86 or AMD64, up until W11 24H2 where the roadblocks are unsurmountable.
duskwuff 1y ago
And its inverse, the IEA solar energy forecast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predictions_-_annual_photovoltaic_additions_2002-2016.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predic... (This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict that it'll level off any day now...)
- grapesodaaaaa 1y ago
  If they keep predicting that, eventually they’ll be right! (It’s hard to harvest more power from a star than a Dyson sphere is capable of)
  - user_of_the_wek 1y ago
    Reminds of something I heard: Of the 3 most recent recessions, analysts predicted 20.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    Very soon we will produce more solar electricity than all of the word's consumption. A "problem" that is even more severe than it looks like, because we consume energy when the Sun is under the horizon too. So, yeah, in a few years they'll be right. Even if for just a short time while the rest of the economy grows to keep up with the change.
- melbourne_mat 1y ago
  Those 2 charts are amazing! At least the Itanium people adjusted their curves downward over time, looks like the IEA just carried on regardless!
  - ghaff 1y ago
    It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but, hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this is going to be a flop from the earliest days.
ghaff 1y ago
Itanium needs a lot longer discussion than can be covered in an HN comment. https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sinking-of-itanic-free-ebook.html https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sinking-of-itanic-...
- chasil 1y ago
  I think Bob Colwell's account is the clearest short synopsis. https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf 'And I finally put my hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said, wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did 30 lines of code”. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let’s move on".'
  - ghaff 1y ago
    There were a bunch of other issues but, yes, the compiler was a big one from which a number of the other issues stemmed.
    - mcepl 1y ago
      I don’t think it is that simple. Itanium was for years supported for example by RHEL (including GCC working of course, if anybody cared enough they could invest into optimising that), it is not like the whole fiasco happened in one moment. No, Itanium was genuinely a bad design, which never got fixed, because it apparently couldn’t be.
      - 1y ago

c-linkage 1y ago

Holy cow was that forecast bad! It reminds me of a meeting long ago where the marketing team reported that oil was going to hit $400/bbl and that this would be great for business. I literally laughed out loud. At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no one could afford to move anything except by ox cart.

Marsymars 1y ago
> At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no one could afford to move anything except by ox cart. Just for some rough math here - I’m currently paying around $1.20/L for gas, and crude oil cost is roughly half of that, so if crude went up by 6x, I’d be looking at $5/L for gas. Gas is currently about 20% of my per-km cost of driving, so that price increase at the pump would increase my per-km cost by about 60%. FWIW that’s roughly the same per-km cost increase that people have voluntarily taken on over the past decade in North America by buying more expensive cars. (Though this does apply to personal transportation only, the math on e.g. transport trucks is different)
- nicoburns 1y ago
  > by buying more expensive cars Not to mention less efficient cars.
  - sheepscreek 1y ago
    Not to mention, cars.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  The issue isn't person transport it is shipping and home heating and agriculture I drive electric so like to imagine myself sheltered from gas price increases but I know grocery costs would explode
  - andrew_lettuce 1y ago
    Especially if you live were gas cost a buck twenty a liter
    - Marsymars 1y ago
      Well it's that high because of taxes, so if crude goes up the total price will go up proportionally less than places that have more of the gas cost comprised of non-taxes. (Some of the taxes are flat, and some get waived when gas gets expensive.)
- andrew_lettuce 1y ago
  How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price? The economics are incredibly complex and murky, and the price of gas doesn't move with any sort of linear relation to crude except in very long timeframes. Regional refining capacity is way more important.
  - Marsymars 1y ago
    > How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price? I googled for a couple sources on the breakdown of the price of gasoline, and they seemed to be in agreement that the raw cost of crude is somewhere around half. (And broke refining out separately.) I'm sure it's not perfect, but it seems fairly reasonable. (And it can be off by quite a lot and still not make a huge difference to the cost-per-km of driving.)
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    > How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price? Look at gas prices in your area. Look at the price of crude. Divide. How could you possibly not be able to estimate the fraction? And yeah ideally you use an average number over some months and you sample the crude earlier than the gas but those are minor tweaks.
    - Macha 1y ago
      That's assuming the other costs (refining energy costs, transport, the company's gross margin) are uncorrelated to the price of crude oil, which seems unlikely
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        A) Just calculating the percentage doesn't assume that. B) They shouldn't correlate by a particularly large amount in a competitive environment. For an approximation as rough as "half" and assuming no other changes it's not a big deal.
  - Hojojo 1y ago
    The price of gas isn't immediately and directly impacted by the price of crude because of futures contracts. This naturally means gas prices will move to match the price of crude over time. It's a feature of the current system, not an indication that the price of gas isn't heavily reliant on gas. Nobody is making gas with spot prices.

wmf 1y ago

The plan was to artificially suppress x86-64 to leave customers with no real alternative to Itanium. The early sales projections made sense under that assumption.

saghm 1y ago
I had heard that it wasn't suppression as much as just not making it a thing at all, and that AMD used the opportunity to extend x86 to 64-bit, and Intel was essentially forced to follow suit to avoid losing more of the market. It also explains why the shorthand "amd64" is used; Intel didn't actually design x86_64 itself.
- monocasa 1y ago
  There was apparently earlier Pentium 4s that supported some version of a 64bit isa, support for which was fused off before sending to customers in order to convince people to move to Itanium. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/former-intel-cpu-details-how-internal-x86-64-efforts-were-suppressed-prior-to-amd64s-success https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/former-intel...
  - chasil 1y ago
    I have some very old servers that have the Pentium 4 architecture with amd64 capability.
    - fuzzfactor 1y ago
      I've still got a couple small business models along these lines that are over 20 years old now. Still running possibly because I always turn them fully off when not using them. No hibernation, sleep or other monkey business. One Dell has an early 64-bit mainboard but only a 32-bit CPU in that socket, just fine for Windows XP and will also run W10 32-bit (slowly), mainly dual booting to Debian i386 now since it retired from office work. Puts out so much heat I would imagine there is a lot of bypassed silicon on the chip drawing power but not helping process. IIRC a 64-bit CPU for that socket was known to exist but was more or less "unobtanium". Then a trusty HP tower with the Pentium D, which was supposedly a "double" with two x86 arch patterns on the same chip. This one runs everything x86 or AMD64, up until W11 24H2 where the roadblocks are unsurmountable.

duskwuff 1y ago

And its inverse, the IEA solar energy forecast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predictions_-_annual_photovoltaic_additions_2002-2016.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predic... (This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict that it'll level off any day now...)

grapesodaaaaa 1y ago
If they keep predicting that, eventually they’ll be right! (It’s hard to harvest more power from a star than a Dyson sphere is capable of)
- user_of_the_wek 1y ago
  Reminds of something I heard: Of the 3 most recent recessions, analysts predicted 20.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  Very soon we will produce more solar electricity than all of the word's consumption. A "problem" that is even more severe than it looks like, because we consume energy when the Sun is under the horizon too. So, yeah, in a few years they'll be right. Even if for just a short time while the rest of the economy grows to keep up with the change.
melbourne_mat 1y ago
Those 2 charts are amazing! At least the Itanium people adjusted their curves downward over time, looks like the IEA just carried on regardless!
- ghaff 1y ago
  It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but, hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this is going to be a flop from the earliest days.

ghaff 1y ago

Itanium needs a lot longer discussion than can be covered in an HN comment. https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sinking-of-itanic-free-ebook.html https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sinking-of-itanic-...

chasil 1y ago
I think Bob Colwell's account is the clearest short synopsis. https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf 'And I finally put my hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said, wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did 30 lines of code”. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let’s move on".'
- ghaff 1y ago
  There were a bunch of other issues but, yes, the compiler was a big one from which a number of the other issues stemmed.
  - mcepl 1y ago
    I don’t think it is that simple. Itanium was for years supported for example by RHEL (including GCC working of course, if anybody cared enough they could invest into optimising that), it is not like the whole fiasco happened in one moment. No, Itanium was genuinely a bad design, which never got fixed, because it apparently couldn’t be.
    - 1y ago