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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 obviou

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.
  - fulafel 3mo ago
    > If Itanium never happened, 64-bit x86 server chips would have done the same thing to MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, PowerPC. If AMD had launched amd64 server chips those vendors onboard we might have had a different 64-bit x86 market. And those vendors would have had a chance to succeed or fail on their own merits instead of due to dead end chip.
MisterTea 3mo ago
> Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers Supermicro and pretty sure Tyan offered Itanium motherboards. From what I remember the Itanium was always harped on as too complex and too power hungry for mainstream while offering abysmal x86 emulation which soured its adoption. It had a niche in certain industries like HPC and high reliability. AMD's x64 architecture launched only 2 years after Itanium launched and pretty much destroyed any future for Itanium.

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.
- fulafel 3mo ago
  > If Itanium never happened, 64-bit x86 server chips would have done the same thing to MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, PowerPC. If AMD had launched amd64 server chips those vendors onboard we might have had a different 64-bit x86 market. And those vendors would have had a chance to succeed or fail on their own merits instead of due to dead end chip.

MisterTea 3mo ago

> Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers Supermicro and pretty sure Tyan offered Itanium motherboards. From what I remember the Itanium was always harped on as too complex and too power hungry for mainstream while offering abysmal x86 emulation which soured its adoption. It had a niche in certain industries like HPC and high reliability. AMD's x64 architecture launched only 2 years after Itanium launched and pretty much destroyed any future for Itanium.