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Paper-Itanium is unfairly blamed / credited with that, but it's not exactly true. The vertically integrated RISC/UNIX minicomputer companies were not on economi

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 2mo 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.
- stinkbeetle 2mo ago
  AMD did launch amd64 server chips. The first ones were Opteron, first (and only until Nehalem) x86 with ODMC, glueless multiprocessor up to 8-way (though that was a bit flakey, 4-way was decent), and first dual core. It destroyed Intel's CPUs in many measure of performance for server workloads. Before Intel's decade of humiliation with their 10nm fiasco and before Zen, AMD had a hell of a time getting ISVs and IHVs on board in the server space with producing them, certifying them, etc.,. Which wasn't entirely irrational, Intel was much more mature in a lot of ways in their hardware and software stacks, they were a big company, perceived as less risky, etc. So it's not too surprising that those companies didn't jump to Opteron. Some did consider it, mind you. Though AMD went through doldrums of their own after Opteron (with Core2/Nehalem-ish era) where they shat the bed with their cores and were pretty handily beaten by Intel for quite a long while until Zen came along -- so that is possibly some vindication for the risk adverse by not going all in on Opteron.
  - fulafel 2mo ago
    Yep, those vendors could conceivably been onboard and using launching on Opteron (if there was no Itanium and Intel was seen as the common enemy). They might have given AMD some help with the validation, RAS etc too. Of course in the alternative history Intel might have done something else in place of IA64 that competed with amd64...
  - adrian_b 2mo ago
    Already at launch, and also during the next few years, until Intel fought back with Core 2 (but in servers the Core 2 descendants became better than Opterons only in 2009, with the Nehalem Xeons), Opteron was immensely better than the UltraSPARC CPUs used in the Sun servers. Only the Fujitsu SPARC CPUs were somewhat competitive, even if still significantly weaker. The Intel Pentium 4 Xeons were also worse, despite higher clock frequencies. But as you say, the inertia in servers is huge, so Opteron gained market share very slowly, despite being by far the most performant server CPU that was available. Where I worked at that time, we had big server farms with Sun or Fujitsu servers, which were disliked by design engineers like myself for their slowness. We had to make great efforts to convince the management to buy a few Opteron-based servers. Of course, after we got them they ran circles around the Sun or Fujitsu servers, a single dual-socket Opteron could be much faster than an 8-socket Sun server whose cost was many times greater.
pjmlp 2mo ago
> The vertically integrated RISC/UNIX minicomputer companies were not on economically viable trajectories. Well, actually one survived, and is making a fruity company quite happy, which also survived the 16 and 8 bit vertically integrated home computer companies. The successful merge of NeXT and Apple, meant PC OEMs now dream of margins of those days hence why building desktops has become a niche market, everything is vertically integrated across laptops, tablets and phones and smart devices. That alternative timeline means Intel would actually bother creating 64-bit x86 server chips instead of Itanium, because on their roadmap they were never expecting AMD to come out with an alternative.
- stinkbeetle 2mo ago
  Yes NeXT/Apple survive, although they commodity m68k CPUs, not quite your traditional UNIX minicomputer. Those were IBM, Sun, HP, DEC, maybe SGI. Designed their own ISAs, CPUs, interconnect fabric, 3 of them did their own silicon manufacturing. One does still survive though, that's IBM's POWER / AIX. Still actively developed, though there is the feeling of 'when' rather than 'if' for them too.
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    I did not count AIX / Solaris in, because they are always some racks in a server room, or the whole IBM / Unisys / Fujitsu for that matter. I was only thinking about UNIX workstations, those under/besides the desk. Otherwise you're right, there are few more options available still.
    - stinkbeetle 2mo ago
      Not true, they all did workstations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RS/6000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RS/6000 https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1fz29tx/rs6000_laptop_saved_from_the_scrap_heap/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1fz29tx/r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_IRIS#MIPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_IRIS#MIPS https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-9000_720_730_750.html https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-9000_720_730_750.html Apple (or NeXT) were never vertically integrated back then. In the last 6 years with Apple making their own CPUs for OSX you could call them a vertically integrated UNIX shop. Not minicomputer though, which is from my post you replied to. Apple was not a vertically integrated vendor that survived bottom-up attack, they attacked Intel from bottom up via mobile/smartphone cores in a similar way Intel did to the minicomputers.
p_l 2mo ago
Alpha cancellation happened before HP/Compaq merger, when it was purely Compaq decision. At the time some partnerships were slowly reducing the base costs of making Alpha machines (with K7 Athlon motherboards and EV6 Alpha being essentially signal compatible but not pinout compatible - you could reuse the chips and most of the design). Compaq however... was not interested, for various reasons.
- stinkbeetle 2mo ago
  Oh you must be right, I mix up my time lines. In any case the economics were more or less the same as Alpha as for the others. They couldn't support integrated silicon manufacturing. It wasn't even just the manufacturing (which could be outsourced although arguably not as competitively as integrated shops like Intel until TSMC really hit its stride). Or the logic and physical design. But the software development and ecosystem support costs were ballooning too. Alpha like the rest of them just never made sense unless they could make competitive cheap systems that were compatible, and by the time efforts like Windows ports and x86 emulation came along, it was already too late.
  - spijdar 2mo ago
    I think you're right overall that Itanium is used too often as the reason why all the RISC platforms died/were cancelled, as if they would have had healthy futures had Itanium simply not existed, but I do wonder about Alpha. I wasn't around at the time, so I don't know what availability and pricing actually looked like, but unlike the other RISC platforms, Alpha was actually available on PC-like systems, with PCI and ISA busses, and x86 emulation at the firmware layer, allowing regular PC peripherals like VGA cards to work. Windows and, significantly, Linux, had pretty superb support for Alpha. It's not enough to suggest that it had a chance "in any reality", but it seems like a much more potent competitor than PowerPC or SPARC or MIPS, it only because of the platform and OS support. Both Windows and Linux had pretty capable x86 emulation software layers too, and not just at the very end!
    - stinkbeetle 2mo ago

fulafel 2mo 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.

stinkbeetle 2mo ago
AMD did launch amd64 server chips. The first ones were Opteron, first (and only until Nehalem) x86 with ODMC, glueless multiprocessor up to 8-way (though that was a bit flakey, 4-way was decent), and first dual core. It destroyed Intel's CPUs in many measure of performance for server workloads. Before Intel's decade of humiliation with their 10nm fiasco and before Zen, AMD had a hell of a time getting ISVs and IHVs on board in the server space with producing them, certifying them, etc.,. Which wasn't entirely irrational, Intel was much more mature in a lot of ways in their hardware and software stacks, they were a big company, perceived as less risky, etc. So it's not too surprising that those companies didn't jump to Opteron. Some did consider it, mind you. Though AMD went through doldrums of their own after Opteron (with Core2/Nehalem-ish era) where they shat the bed with their cores and were pretty handily beaten by Intel for quite a long while until Zen came along -- so that is possibly some vindication for the risk adverse by not going all in on Opteron.
- fulafel 2mo ago
  Yep, those vendors could conceivably been onboard and using launching on Opteron (if there was no Itanium and Intel was seen as the common enemy). They might have given AMD some help with the validation, RAS etc too. Of course in the alternative history Intel might have done something else in place of IA64 that competed with amd64...
- adrian_b 2mo ago
  Already at launch, and also during the next few years, until Intel fought back with Core 2 (but in servers the Core 2 descendants became better than Opterons only in 2009, with the Nehalem Xeons), Opteron was immensely better than the UltraSPARC CPUs used in the Sun servers. Only the Fujitsu SPARC CPUs were somewhat competitive, even if still significantly weaker. The Intel Pentium 4 Xeons were also worse, despite higher clock frequencies. But as you say, the inertia in servers is huge, so Opteron gained market share very slowly, despite being by far the most performant server CPU that was available. Where I worked at that time, we had big server farms with Sun or Fujitsu servers, which were disliked by design engineers like myself for their slowness. We had to make great efforts to convince the management to buy a few Opteron-based servers. Of course, after we got them they ran circles around the Sun or Fujitsu servers, a single dual-socket Opteron could be much faster than an 8-socket Sun server whose cost was many times greater.

pjmlp 2mo ago

> The vertically integrated RISC/UNIX minicomputer companies were not on economically viable trajectories. Well, actually one survived, and is making a fruity company quite happy, which also survived the 16 and 8 bit vertically integrated home computer companies. The successful merge of NeXT and Apple, meant PC OEMs now dream of margins of those days hence why building desktops has become a niche market, everything is vertically integrated across laptops, tablets and phones and smart devices. That alternative timeline means Intel would actually bother creating 64-bit x86 server chips instead of Itanium, because on their roadmap they were never expecting AMD to come out with an alternative.

stinkbeetle 2mo ago
Yes NeXT/Apple survive, although they commodity m68k CPUs, not quite your traditional UNIX minicomputer. Those were IBM, Sun, HP, DEC, maybe SGI. Designed their own ISAs, CPUs, interconnect fabric, 3 of them did their own silicon manufacturing. One does still survive though, that's IBM's POWER / AIX. Still actively developed, though there is the feeling of 'when' rather than 'if' for them too.
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  I did not count AIX / Solaris in, because they are always some racks in a server room, or the whole IBM / Unisys / Fujitsu for that matter. I was only thinking about UNIX workstations, those under/besides the desk. Otherwise you're right, there are few more options available still.
  - stinkbeetle 2mo ago
    Not true, they all did workstations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RS/6000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RS/6000 https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1fz29tx/rs6000_laptop_saved_from_the_scrap_heap/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1fz29tx/r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_IRIS#MIPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_IRIS#MIPS https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-9000_720_730_750.html https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-9000_720_730_750.html Apple (or NeXT) were never vertically integrated back then. In the last 6 years with Apple making their own CPUs for OSX you could call them a vertically integrated UNIX shop. Not minicomputer though, which is from my post you replied to. Apple was not a vertically integrated vendor that survived bottom-up attack, they attacked Intel from bottom up via mobile/smartphone cores in a similar way Intel did to the minicomputers.

p_l 2mo ago

Alpha cancellation happened before HP/Compaq merger, when it was purely Compaq decision. At the time some partnerships were slowly reducing the base costs of making Alpha machines (with K7 Athlon motherboards and EV6 Alpha being essentially signal compatible but not pinout compatible - you could reuse the chips and most of the design). Compaq however... was not interested, for various reasons.

stinkbeetle 2mo ago
Oh you must be right, I mix up my time lines. In any case the economics were more or less the same as Alpha as for the others. They couldn't support integrated silicon manufacturing. It wasn't even just the manufacturing (which could be outsourced although arguably not as competitively as integrated shops like Intel until TSMC really hit its stride). Or the logic and physical design. But the software development and ecosystem support costs were ballooning too. Alpha like the rest of them just never made sense unless they could make competitive cheap systems that were compatible, and by the time efforts like Windows ports and x86 emulation came along, it was already too late.
- spijdar 2mo ago
  I think you're right overall that Itanium is used too often as the reason why all the RISC platforms died/were cancelled, as if they would have had healthy futures had Itanium simply not existed, but I do wonder about Alpha. I wasn't around at the time, so I don't know what availability and pricing actually looked like, but unlike the other RISC platforms, Alpha was actually available on PC-like systems, with PCI and ISA busses, and x86 emulation at the firmware layer, allowing regular PC peripherals like VGA cards to work. Windows and, significantly, Linux, had pretty superb support for Alpha. It's not enough to suggest that it had a chance "in any reality", but it seems like a much more potent competitor than PowerPC or SPARC or MIPS, it only because of the platform and OS support. Both Windows and Linux had pretty capable x86 emulation software layers too, and not just at the very end!
  - stinkbeetle 2mo ago