5 ms·

I would love to read the Microsoft PM spec for this product. Who in the world were they making it for? Itanium never made it into the consumer-class hardware t

I would love to read the Microsoft PM spec for this product. Who in the world were they making it for? Itanium never made it into the consumer-class hardware that was XP’s audience. AFAIK, Intel never even published a roadmap for that to happen! Maybe a proof of concept they shipped as a demonstration of loyalty to Intel?!

mrpippy 3mo ago
There were Itanium workstations (https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_i2000.html https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_i2000.html, https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_zx2000.html https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_zx2000.html), but of course these quickly crashed and burned with the rest of Itanium
- twoodfin 3mo ago
  Yeah, I had forgotten that by the Windows XP/Server 2003 era, the latter was definitely a server product, with XP targeting the workstation world. That still seems weird to me. If I had to rely on a PC for high-end work in that period, I wanted the server SKU.
  - pjmlp 3mo ago
    Between 2000 and 2003, I used Windows Server as desktop at work, after a short period of dual booting between Windows 2000 and Red-Hat Linux, which I stop doing when routinely rebooting into Windows for support started being a frequent habit. Thus I fully switched to Windows Server to be able to check the same issues as the customers had, and since we only supported big iron UNIX during those years, I would anyway use telnet / X Windows to connect to those machines.
walrus01 3mo ago
In approx. 2000 to 2002, 2003 or around then, there was a theoretical dream that Itanium based workstations would become a real mass market thing, but it obviously never caught on. Intel never made Itanium CPUs cheap enough to realistically purchase and Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers (the same companies that were making really nice boards for the 1 GHz to 1.2 GHz socketed Pentium 3 with 512KB cache and the first generations of Pentium 4). Also the performance sucked. This was before AMD64 existed on the corporate desktop or home desktop.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  Had AMD not come out with AMD64, and Itanium would eventually prevail, as there was no other alternative coming from Intel.
  - chrchr 3mo ago
    I vividly remember the months after AMD64 came out when tech companies were dumping their specialty RISC server hardware (mostly Sun, but some other stuff too) and replacing them with commodity AMD boxes. It was felt like a monumental shift.
  - saati 3mo ago
    It wouldn't, performance was horrible.
    - pjmlp 3mo ago
      Yes it would, when the only way is to press forward, eventually something has to improve.
- acdha 3mo ago
  Yeah, that was real soon now in the mid-90s – I remember reading Byte in high school and they’d be talking about how Alpha, MIPS, etc. workstations were doomed and then it kept getting pushed back – maybe 98/99, early in the next century, … and then AMD launched x86-64 and everyone just stopped pretending Itanium was ever going to happen.
- bobmcnamara 3mo ago
  It totally worked! Took out like four decent risc competitors with just a little FOMO
  - stinkbeetle 3mo ago
    Paper-Itanium is unfairly blamed / credited with that, but it's not exactly true. The vertically integrated RISC/UNIX minicomputer companies were not on economically viable trajectories. x86 systems were undercutting their high margin workstation and server business, subsidized by enormous volumes in PC market needed to sustain increasing silicon manufacturing and design costs of new generations. The RISCs were forced to keep retreating to higher margin, lower volume, more specialized, higher performance markets which was really their only option by that point but it was also exactly the wrong direction to go in for long-term viability in the face of these prevailing trends. Intel had their foundries and CPU cores paid for by video gamers and receptionists and students typing up their assignments and people looking at porn at 14.4kbps. Servers and workstations were pretty much gravy and every year there was less their systems couldn't do compared to the big iron. Those computers pretty much sold themselves, contrast with every $20k workstation or $100k server that the unix guys had to explain why they were worth 5x the grey box on the desk. SGI was struggling to make their MIPS chips and were pretty quickly finished off when nvidia started making GPUs. Itanium originated at HP as a PA-RISC replacement. They owned DEC Alpha when they killed it but arguably DEC didn't have a big base of legacy software at that point. IBM and Sun stood for a lot longer, mainly I would say largely due to locked in customers/data on Oracle and DB2 databases and proprietary software, rather than the merits of their hardware. If Itanium never happened, 64-bit x86 server chips would have done the same thing to MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, PowerPC. Might have happened even sooner from Intel since they allegedly sandbagged efforts in that direction to protect Itanium.
ghaff 3mo ago
It's pretty simple. There was a point in the early 2000s (especially pre-AMD x64) when it was pretty broadly assumed that Itanium from Intel was going to inevitably win given that a 64-bit transition was inevitable (correct) and that it would happen on Intel's terms (incorrect).
sidewndr46 3mo ago
I believe efforts like this were funded by HP. It is why the Itanium was kept around for so long despite being dead on arrival.

mrpippy 3mo ago

There were Itanium workstations (https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_i2000.html https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_i2000.html, https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_zx2000.html https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_zx2000.html), but of course these quickly crashed and burned with the rest of Itanium

twoodfin 3mo ago
Yeah, I had forgotten that by the Windows XP/Server 2003 era, the latter was definitely a server product, with XP targeting the workstation world. That still seems weird to me. If I had to rely on a PC for high-end work in that period, I wanted the server SKU.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  Between 2000 and 2003, I used Windows Server as desktop at work, after a short period of dual booting between Windows 2000 and Red-Hat Linux, which I stop doing when routinely rebooting into Windows for support started being a frequent habit. Thus I fully switched to Windows Server to be able to check the same issues as the customers had, and since we only supported big iron UNIX during those years, I would anyway use telnet / X Windows to connect to those machines.

walrus01 3mo ago

In approx. 2000 to 2002, 2003 or around then, there was a theoretical dream that Itanium based workstations would become a real mass market thing, but it obviously never caught on. Intel never made Itanium CPUs cheap enough to realistically purchase and Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers (the same companies that were making really nice boards for the 1 GHz to 1.2 GHz socketed Pentium 3 with 512KB cache and the first generations of Pentium 4). Also the performance sucked. This was before AMD64 existed on the corporate desktop or home desktop.

pjmlp 3mo ago
Had AMD not come out with AMD64, and Itanium would eventually prevail, as there was no other alternative coming from Intel.
- chrchr 3mo ago
  I vividly remember the months after AMD64 came out when tech companies were dumping their specialty RISC server hardware (mostly Sun, but some other stuff too) and replacing them with commodity AMD boxes. It was felt like a monumental shift.
- saati 3mo ago
  It wouldn't, performance was horrible.
  - pjmlp 3mo ago
    Yes it would, when the only way is to press forward, eventually something has to improve.
acdha 3mo ago
Yeah, that was real soon now in the mid-90s – I remember reading Byte in high school and they’d be talking about how Alpha, MIPS, etc. workstations were doomed and then it kept getting pushed back – maybe 98/99, early in the next century, … and then AMD launched x86-64 and everyone just stopped pretending Itanium was ever going to happen.
bobmcnamara 3mo ago
It totally worked! Took out like four decent risc competitors with just a little FOMO
- stinkbeetle 3mo ago
  Paper-Itanium is unfairly blamed / credited with that, but it's not exactly true. The vertically integrated RISC/UNIX minicomputer companies were not on economically viable trajectories. x86 systems were undercutting their high margin workstation and server business, subsidized by enormous volumes in PC market needed to sustain increasing silicon manufacturing and design costs of new generations. The RISCs were forced to keep retreating to higher margin, lower volume, more specialized, higher performance markets which was really their only option by that point but it was also exactly the wrong direction to go in for long-term viability in the face of these prevailing trends. Intel had their foundries and CPU cores paid for by video gamers and receptionists and students typing up their assignments and people looking at porn at 14.4kbps. Servers and workstations were pretty much gravy and every year there was less their systems couldn't do compared to the big iron. Those computers pretty much sold themselves, contrast with every $20k workstation or $100k server that the unix guys had to explain why they were worth 5x the grey box on the desk. SGI was struggling to make their MIPS chips and were pretty quickly finished off when nvidia started making GPUs. Itanium originated at HP as a PA-RISC replacement. They owned DEC Alpha when they killed it but arguably DEC didn't have a big base of legacy software at that point. IBM and Sun stood for a lot longer, mainly I would say largely due to locked in customers/data on Oracle and DB2 databases and proprietary software, rather than the merits of their hardware. If Itanium never happened, 64-bit x86 server chips would have done the same thing to MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, PowerPC. Might have happened even sooner from Intel since they allegedly sandbagged efforts in that direction to protect Itanium.

ghaff 3mo ago

It's pretty simple. There was a point in the early 2000s (especially pre-AMD x64) when it was pretty broadly assumed that Itanium from Intel was going to inevitably win given that a 64-bit transition was inevitable (correct) and that it would happen on Intel's terms (incorrect).

sidewndr46 3mo ago

I believe efforts like this were funded by HP. It is why the Itanium was kept around for so long despite being dead on arrival.