8 ms·

Fun fact: Bob Colwell (chief architect of the Pentium Pro through Pentium 4) recently revealed that the Pentium 4 had its own 64-bit extension to x86 that would

by ndiddy 1y ago

Fun fact: Bob Colwell (chief architect of the Pentium Pro through Pentium 4) recently revealed that the Pentium 4 had its own 64-bit extension to x86 that would have beaten AMD64 to market by several years, but management forced him to disable it because they were worried that it would cannibalize IA64 sales. > Intel’s Pentium 4 had our own internal version of x86–64. But you could not use it: we were forced to “fuse it off”, meaning that even though the functionality was in there, it could not be exercised by a user. This was a marketing decision by Intel — they believed, probably rightly, that bringing out a new 64-bit feature in the x86 would be perceived as betting against their own native-64-bit Itanium, and might well severely damage Itanium’s chances. I was told, not once, but twice, that if I “didn’t stop yammering about the need to go 64-bits in x86 I’d be fired on the spot” and was directly ordered to take out that 64-bit stuff. https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-delivering-the-first-x86-64-instruction-set-Was-Intel-too-distracted-by-the-Itanium-project-If-so-why-Shouldn-t-Intel-with-its-vast-resources-have-been-able-to-develop-both https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-deli...

wmf 1y ago
It wasn't recent; Yamhill has been known since 2002. A detailed article about this topic just came out: https://computerparkitecture.substack.com/p/the-long-mode-chronicles https://computerparkitecture.substack.com/p/the-long-mode-ch...
kstrauser 1y ago
"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." Intel has a strong history of completely mis-reading the market.
- zh3 1y ago
  Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive":- Quote: Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. - Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid_Survive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid... Takeaway: Be paranoid about MBAs running your business.
  - zer00eyz 1y ago
    > Takeaway: Be paranoid about MBAs running your business. Except Andy is talking about himself, and Noyce the engineers getting it wrong: (watch a few minutes of this to get the gist of where they were vs Japan) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At3256ASxlA&t=465s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At3256ASxlA&t=465s Intel has a long history of sucking, and other people stepping in to force them to get better. Their success has been accident and intervention over and over. And this isnt just an intel thing, this is kind of an American problem (and maybe a business/capitalism problem). See this take on steel: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-innovations-a-history https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno... that sounds an awful lot like what is happening to intel now.
    - wslh 1y ago
      Andy Grove explained this very clearly in his book. By the way, the parallel works if you replace Japan with China in the video. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Japan initially reverse engineered memory chips, and soon it became impossible to compete with them. The Japanese government also heavily subsidized its semiconductor industry during that period. My point isn't to take a side, but simply to highlight how history often repeats itself, sometimes almost literally, not rhyme.
    - II2II 1y ago
      > Intel has a long history of sucking, and other people stepping in to force them to get better. Their success has been accident and intervention over and over. If one can take popular histories of Intel at face value, they have had enough accidental successes, avoided enough failures, and outright failed so many times that they really ought to know better. The Itanium wasn't their first attempt to create an incompatible architecture, and it sounds like it was incredibly successful compared to the iAPX 432. Intel never intended to get into microprocessors, wanting to focus on memory instead. Yet they picked up a couple of contracts (which produced the 4004 and 8008) to survive until they reached their actual goal. Not only did it help the company at the time, but it proved essential to the survival of the company when the Japanese semiconductor industry nearly obliterated American memory manufacturers. On the flip side, the 8080 was source compatible with the 8008. Source compatibility would help sell it to users of the 8008. It sounds like the story behind the 8086 is similar, albeit with a twist: not only did it lead to Intel's success when it was adopted by IBM for the PC, but it was intended as a stopgap measure while the iAPX 432 was produced. This, of course, is a much abbreviated list. It is also impossible to suggest where Intel would be if they made different decisions, since they produced an abundance of other products. We simply don't hear much about them because they were dwarfed by the 80x86 or simply didn't have the public profile of the 80x86 (for example: they produced some popular microcontrollers).
- nextos 1y ago
  I don't think it's just mis-reading. It's also internal politics. How many at Nokia knew that the Maemo/MeeGo series was the future, rather than Symbian? I think quite a few. But Symbian execs fought to make sure Maemo didn't get a mobile radio. In most places, internal feuds and little kingdoms prevail over optimal decisions for the entire organization. I imagine lots of people at Intel were deeply invested in IA-64. Same thing repeats mostly everywhere. For example, from what I've heard from insiders, ChromeOS vs Android battles at Google were epic.
  - immibis 1y ago
    In other words, all complex systems get cancer. Cancer is when elements of a system work to enrich themselves instead of the system.
- cowmix 1y ago
  When I ran the Python Meetup here in Phoenix -- an engineer for Intel's compilers group would show up all the time. I remember he would constantly be frustrated that Intel management would purposely down-play and cripple advances of the Atom processor line because they thought it would be "too good" and cannibalize their desktop lines. This was over 15 years ago -- I was hearing this in real-time. He flat out said that Intel considered the mobile market a joke.
- sys_64738 1y ago
  They don't misread the market so much as intentionally do that due to INTC being a market driven org. They want to suck up all the profits in each generation for each SKU. They stopped being an engineering org in the 80s. I hope they crash and burn.
jcranmer 1y ago
The story I heard (which I can't corroborate) was that it was Microsoft that nixed Intel's alternative 64-bit x86 ISA, instead telling it to implement AMD's version instead.
- smashed 1y ago
  Microsoft did port some versions of Windows to Itanium, so they did not reject it at first. With poor market demand and AMD's success with amd64, Microsoft did not support itanium in vista and later desktop versions which signaled the end of Intel's Itanium.
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    Microsoft also ships/shipped a commercial compiler with tons of users, and so they were probably in a position to realize early that the hypothetical "sufficiently smart compiler" which Itanium needed to reach its potential wasn't actually possible.
    - SunlitCat 1y ago
      I wonder if AI would have been a huge help to that.
      - consp 1y ago
        Some "simple" optimization algorithm would be enough modern "AI" just adds obfuscation. Though it would be slow as hell and thus unusable.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - wmf 1y ago
    Microsoft supported IA-64 (Itanium) and AMD64 but they refused to also support Yamhill. They didn't want to support three different ISAs.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago
I wanted to mention that the Pentium 4 (Prescott) that was marketed as the Centrino in laptops had 64bit capabilities, but it was described as 32bit extended mode. I remember buying a laptop in 2005(?) which I first ran with XP 32bit, and then downloading the wrong Ubuntu 64bit Dapper Drake image, and the 64bit kernel was running...and being super confused about it. Also, for a long while, Intel rebranded the Pentium 4 as Intel Atom, which then usually got an iGPU on top with being a bit higher in clock rates. No idea if this is still the case (post Haswell changes) but I was astonished to buy a CPU 10 years later to have the same kind of oldskool cores in it, just with some modifications, and actually with worse L3 cache than the Centrino variants. core2duo and core2quad were peak coreboot hacking for me, because at the time the intel ucode blob was still fairly simple and didn't contain all the quirks and errata fixes that more modern cpu generations have.
- cogman10 1y ago
  Are you referring to PAE? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
  - esseph 1y ago
    No, EM64T
  - seabrookmx 1y ago
    PAE is a 32-bit feature that was around long before AMD64. OP means EM64T: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005898/processors.html#primary-content https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
- mjg59 1y ago
  Pentium 4 was never marketed as Centrino - that came in with the Pentium M, which was very definitely not 64-bit capable (and didn't even officially have PAE support to begin with). Atom was its own microarchitecture aimed at low power use cases, which Pentium 4 was definitely not.
- 1y ago
kimixa 1y ago
That's no guarantee it would succeed though - AMD64 also cleaned up a number of warts on the x86 architecture, like more registers. While I suspect the Intel equivalent would do similar things, simply from being a big enough break it's an obvious thing to do, there's no guarantee it wouldn't be worse than AMD64. But I guess it could also be "better" from a retrospective perspective. And also remember at the time the Pentium 4 was very much struggling to get the advertised performance. One could argue that one of the major reasons that the AMD64 ISA took off is that the devices that first supported it were (generally) superior even in 32-bit mode. EDIT: And I'm surprised it got as far as silicon. AMD64 was "announced" and the spec released before the pentium 4 was even released, over 3 years before the first AMD implementations could be purchased. I guess Intel thought they didn't "need" to be public about it? And the AMD64 extensions cost a rather non-trivial amount of silicon and engineering effort to implement - did the plan for Itanium change late enough in the P4 design that it couldn't be removed? Or perhaps this all implies it was a much less far-reaching (And so less costly) design?
- chasil 1y ago
  The times that I have used "gcc -S" on my code, I have never seen the additional registers used. I understand that r8-r15 require a REX prefix, which is hostile to code density. I've never done it with -O2. Maybe that would surprise me.
  - astrange 1y ago
    You should be able to see it. REX prefixes cost a lot less than register spills do. If you mean literally `gcc -S`, -O0 is worse than not optimized and basically keeps everything in memory to make it easier to debug. -Os is the one with readable sensible asm.
    - chasil 1y ago
      Thanks, I'll give it a try.
  - o11c 1y ago
    Obviously it depends on how many live variables there are at any point. A lot of nasty loops have relatively few non-memory operands involved, especially without inlining (though even without inlining, the ability to control ABI-mandated spills better will help). But it's guaranteed to use `r8` and `r9` for for a function that takes 5 and 6 integer arguments (including unpacked 128-bit structs as 2 arguments), or 3 and 4 arguments (not sure about unpacking) for Microsoft. And `r10` is used if you make a system call on Linux.
userbinator 1y ago
"Recently revealed" is more like a confirmation of what I had read many years before; and furthermore, that Intel's 64-bit x86 would've been more backwards-compatible and better-fitting than AMD64, which looks extremely inelegant in contrast, with several stupid missteps like https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1216 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1216 (the comment near the bottom is very interesting.) If you look at the 286's 16-bit protected mode and then the 386's 32-bit extensions, they fit neatly into the "gaps" in the former; there are some similar gaps in the latter, which look like they had a future extension in mind. Perhaps that consideration was already there in the 80s when the 386 was being designed, but as usual, management got in the way.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  > (the comment near the bottom is very interesting.) Segmentation very useful for virtualization? I don't follow that claim.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    https://www.pagetable.com/?p=25 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=25
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      "The virtual machine monitor’s trap handler must reside in the guest’s address space, because an exception cannot switch address spaces." I would call this the real problem, and segmentation a bad workaround.
- CheeseFromLidl 1y ago
  would've been more backwards-compatible and better-fitting Eagerly awaiting the first submission of someone decapping, forcing the fuse, capping and running it.
Lu2025 1y ago
> it would cannibalize IA64 sales The concern is that it won't cannibalize sales, it would cannibalize IA64 manager's job and status. "You ship the org chart"
indymike 1y ago
> Fun fact: Bob Colwell (chief architect of the Pentium Pro through Pentium 4) recently revealed that the Pentium 4 had its own 64-bit extension to x86 that would have beaten AMD64 to market by several years, but management forced him to disable it because they were worried that it would cannibalize IA64 sales. File this one under "we made the right decision based on everything we knew at the time." It's really sad because the absolute right choice would have been to extend x86 and let it duke it out with Itanium. Intel would win either way and the competition would have been even more on the back heel. So easy to see that decades later...
mathgradthrow 1y ago
This seems like an object lesson in making sure that the right hand does not know what the left is doing. Yes, if you have two departments working on two mutually exclusive architectures, one of them will necessarily fail. In exchange, however, you can guarantee that it will be the worse one. This is undervalued as a principle since the wasted labor is more easily measured, and therefore decision making is biased towards it.
- short_sells_poo 1y ago
  I agree with you, but perhaps this is very hard (impossible?) to pull off. Invariably, politics will result in various outcomes being favored in management and the moment that groups realize the game is rigged, the whole fair market devolves into the usual political in-fighting.
ChuckMcM 1y ago
Yup. I went to the Microprocessor Forum where they introduced 'Sledgehammer' (the AMD 64 architecture) and came back to NetApp where I was working and started working out how we'd build our next Filer using it. (that was a journey given the AMD distrust inside of NetApp!). I had a pretty frank discussion with the Intel SVP of product who was pretty bought into the Intel "high end is IA, Mid/PC is IA32, embedded is the 8051 stuff". They were having a hard time with getting Itainum wins.
alfiedotwtf 1y ago
> cannibalize IA64 sales Damn!

by ndiddy 1y ago

wmf 1y ago

It wasn't recent; Yamhill has been known since 2002. A detailed article about this topic just came out: https://computerparkitecture.substack.com/p/the-long-mode-chronicles https://computerparkitecture.substack.com/p/the-long-mode-ch...

kstrauser 1y ago

"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." Intel has a strong history of completely mis-reading the market.

zh3 1y ago
Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive":- Quote: Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. - Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid_Survive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid... Takeaway: Be paranoid about MBAs running your business.
- zer00eyz 1y ago
  > Takeaway: Be paranoid about MBAs running your business. Except Andy is talking about himself, and Noyce the engineers getting it wrong: (watch a few minutes of this to get the gist of where they were vs Japan) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At3256ASxlA&t=465s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At3256ASxlA&t=465s Intel has a long history of sucking, and other people stepping in to force them to get better. Their success has been accident and intervention over and over. And this isnt just an intel thing, this is kind of an American problem (and maybe a business/capitalism problem). See this take on steel: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-innovations-a-history https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno... that sounds an awful lot like what is happening to intel now.
  - wslh 1y ago
    Andy Grove explained this very clearly in his book. By the way, the parallel works if you replace Japan with China in the video. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Japan initially reverse engineered memory chips, and soon it became impossible to compete with them. The Japanese government also heavily subsidized its semiconductor industry during that period. My point isn't to take a side, but simply to highlight how history often repeats itself, sometimes almost literally, not rhyme.
  - II2II 1y ago
    > Intel has a long history of sucking, and other people stepping in to force them to get better. Their success has been accident and intervention over and over. If one can take popular histories of Intel at face value, they have had enough accidental successes, avoided enough failures, and outright failed so many times that they really ought to know better. The Itanium wasn't their first attempt to create an incompatible architecture, and it sounds like it was incredibly successful compared to the iAPX 432. Intel never intended to get into microprocessors, wanting to focus on memory instead. Yet they picked up a couple of contracts (which produced the 4004 and 8008) to survive until they reached their actual goal. Not only did it help the company at the time, but it proved essential to the survival of the company when the Japanese semiconductor industry nearly obliterated American memory manufacturers. On the flip side, the 8080 was source compatible with the 8008. Source compatibility would help sell it to users of the 8008. It sounds like the story behind the 8086 is similar, albeit with a twist: not only did it lead to Intel's success when it was adopted by IBM for the PC, but it was intended as a stopgap measure while the iAPX 432 was produced. This, of course, is a much abbreviated list. It is also impossible to suggest where Intel would be if they made different decisions, since they produced an abundance of other products. We simply don't hear much about them because they were dwarfed by the 80x86 or simply didn't have the public profile of the 80x86 (for example: they produced some popular microcontrollers).
nextos 1y ago
I don't think it's just mis-reading. It's also internal politics. How many at Nokia knew that the Maemo/MeeGo series was the future, rather than Symbian? I think quite a few. But Symbian execs fought to make sure Maemo didn't get a mobile radio. In most places, internal feuds and little kingdoms prevail over optimal decisions for the entire organization. I imagine lots of people at Intel were deeply invested in IA-64. Same thing repeats mostly everywhere. For example, from what I've heard from insiders, ChromeOS vs Android battles at Google were epic.
- immibis 1y ago
  In other words, all complex systems get cancer. Cancer is when elements of a system work to enrich themselves instead of the system.
cowmix 1y ago
When I ran the Python Meetup here in Phoenix -- an engineer for Intel's compilers group would show up all the time. I remember he would constantly be frustrated that Intel management would purposely down-play and cripple advances of the Atom processor line because they thought it would be "too good" and cannibalize their desktop lines. This was over 15 years ago -- I was hearing this in real-time. He flat out said that Intel considered the mobile market a joke.
sys_64738 1y ago
They don't misread the market so much as intentionally do that due to INTC being a market driven org. They want to suck up all the profits in each generation for each SKU. They stopped being an engineering org in the 80s. I hope they crash and burn.

jcranmer 1y ago

The story I heard (which I can't corroborate) was that it was Microsoft that nixed Intel's alternative 64-bit x86 ISA, instead telling it to implement AMD's version instead.

smashed 1y ago
Microsoft did port some versions of Windows to Itanium, so they did not reject it at first. With poor market demand and AMD's success with amd64, Microsoft did not support itanium in vista and later desktop versions which signaled the end of Intel's Itanium.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  Microsoft also ships/shipped a commercial compiler with tons of users, and so they were probably in a position to realize early that the hypothetical "sufficiently smart compiler" which Itanium needed to reach its potential wasn't actually possible.
  - SunlitCat 1y ago
    I wonder if AI would have been a huge help to that.
    - consp 1y ago
      Some "simple" optimization algorithm would be enough modern "AI" just adds obfuscation. Though it would be slow as hell and thus unusable.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wmf 1y ago
  Microsoft supported IA-64 (Itanium) and AMD64 but they refused to also support Yamhill. They didn't want to support three different ISAs.

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago

I wanted to mention that the Pentium 4 (Prescott) that was marketed as the Centrino in laptops had 64bit capabilities, but it was described as 32bit extended mode. I remember buying a laptop in 2005(?) which I first ran with XP 32bit, and then downloading the wrong Ubuntu 64bit Dapper Drake image, and the 64bit kernel was running...and being super confused about it. Also, for a long while, Intel rebranded the Pentium 4 as Intel Atom, which then usually got an iGPU on top with being a bit higher in clock rates. No idea if this is still the case (post Haswell changes) but I was astonished to buy a CPU 10 years later to have the same kind of oldskool cores in it, just with some modifications, and actually with worse L3 cache than the Centrino variants. core2duo and core2quad were peak coreboot hacking for me, because at the time the intel ucode blob was still fairly simple and didn't contain all the quirks and errata fixes that more modern cpu generations have.

cogman10 1y ago
Are you referring to PAE? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
- esseph 1y ago
  No, EM64T
- seabrookmx 1y ago
  PAE is a 32-bit feature that was around long before AMD64. OP means EM64T: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005898/processors.html#primary-content https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
mjg59 1y ago
Pentium 4 was never marketed as Centrino - that came in with the Pentium M, which was very definitely not 64-bit capable (and didn't even officially have PAE support to begin with). Atom was its own microarchitecture aimed at low power use cases, which Pentium 4 was definitely not.
1y ago

kimixa 1y ago

That's no guarantee it would succeed though - AMD64 also cleaned up a number of warts on the x86 architecture, like more registers. While I suspect the Intel equivalent would do similar things, simply from being a big enough break it's an obvious thing to do, there's no guarantee it wouldn't be worse than AMD64. But I guess it could also be "better" from a retrospective perspective. And also remember at the time the Pentium 4 was very much struggling to get the advertised performance. One could argue that one of the major reasons that the AMD64 ISA took off is that the devices that first supported it were (generally) superior even in 32-bit mode. EDIT: And I'm surprised it got as far as silicon. AMD64 was "announced" and the spec released before the pentium 4 was even released, over 3 years before the first AMD implementations could be purchased. I guess Intel thought they didn't "need" to be public about it? And the AMD64 extensions cost a rather non-trivial amount of silicon and engineering effort to implement - did the plan for Itanium change late enough in the P4 design that it couldn't be removed? Or perhaps this all implies it was a much less far-reaching (And so less costly) design?

chasil 1y ago
The times that I have used "gcc -S" on my code, I have never seen the additional registers used. I understand that r8-r15 require a REX prefix, which is hostile to code density. I've never done it with -O2. Maybe that would surprise me.
- astrange 1y ago
  You should be able to see it. REX prefixes cost a lot less than register spills do. If you mean literally `gcc -S`, -O0 is worse than not optimized and basically keeps everything in memory to make it easier to debug. -Os is the one with readable sensible asm.
  - chasil 1y ago
    Thanks, I'll give it a try.
- o11c 1y ago
  Obviously it depends on how many live variables there are at any point. A lot of nasty loops have relatively few non-memory operands involved, especially without inlining (though even without inlining, the ability to control ABI-mandated spills better will help). But it's guaranteed to use `r8` and `r9` for for a function that takes 5 and 6 integer arguments (including unpacked 128-bit structs as 2 arguments), or 3 and 4 arguments (not sure about unpacking) for Microsoft. And `r10` is used if you make a system call on Linux.

userbinator 1y ago

"Recently revealed" is more like a confirmation of what I had read many years before; and furthermore, that Intel's 64-bit x86 would've been more backwards-compatible and better-fitting than AMD64, which looks extremely inelegant in contrast, with several stupid missteps like https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1216 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1216 (the comment near the bottom is very interesting.) If you look at the 286's 16-bit protected mode and then the 386's 32-bit extensions, they fit neatly into the "gaps" in the former; there are some similar gaps in the latter, which look like they had a future extension in mind. Perhaps that consideration was already there in the 80s when the 386 was being designed, but as usual, management got in the way.

Dylan16807 1y ago
> (the comment near the bottom is very interesting.) Segmentation very useful for virtualization? I don't follow that claim.
- userbinator 1y ago
  https://www.pagetable.com/?p=25 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=25
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    "The virtual machine monitor’s trap handler must reside in the guest’s address space, because an exception cannot switch address spaces." I would call this the real problem, and segmentation a bad workaround.
CheeseFromLidl 1y ago
would've been more backwards-compatible and better-fitting Eagerly awaiting the first submission of someone decapping, forcing the fuse, capping and running it.

Lu2025 1y ago

> it would cannibalize IA64 sales The concern is that it won't cannibalize sales, it would cannibalize IA64 manager's job and status. "You ship the org chart"

indymike 1y ago

> Fun fact: Bob Colwell (chief architect of the Pentium Pro through Pentium 4) recently revealed that the Pentium 4 had its own 64-bit extension to x86 that would have beaten AMD64 to market by several years, but management forced him to disable it because they were worried that it would cannibalize IA64 sales. File this one under "we made the right decision based on everything we knew at the time." It's really sad because the absolute right choice would have been to extend x86 and let it duke it out with Itanium. Intel would win either way and the competition would have been even more on the back heel. So easy to see that decades later...

mathgradthrow 1y ago

This seems like an object lesson in making sure that the right hand does not know what the left is doing. Yes, if you have two departments working on two mutually exclusive architectures, one of them will necessarily fail. In exchange, however, you can guarantee that it will be the worse one. This is undervalued as a principle since the wasted labor is more easily measured, and therefore decision making is biased towards it.

short_sells_poo 1y ago
I agree with you, but perhaps this is very hard (impossible?) to pull off. Invariably, politics will result in various outcomes being favored in management and the moment that groups realize the game is rigged, the whole fair market devolves into the usual political in-fighting.

ChuckMcM 1y ago

Yup. I went to the Microprocessor Forum where they introduced 'Sledgehammer' (the AMD 64 architecture) and came back to NetApp where I was working and started working out how we'd build our next Filer using it. (that was a journey given the AMD distrust inside of NetApp!). I had a pretty frank discussion with the Intel SVP of product who was pretty bought into the Intel "high end is IA, Mid/PC is IA32, embedded is the 8051 stuff". They were having a hard time with getting Itainum wins.

alfiedotwtf 1y ago

> cannibalize IA64 sales Damn!