Ah sorry, didn't mean to sound so haughty, I really just quickly type these comments off before I start my workday, really should give more thought to sounding a bit more tactful.

It's really cool they you get to meet people like you here in the comments :)

However I think the video raises an interesting point - I imagine you're an expert on modern CPU optimization, and spend quite a bit of time thinking about cache access patterns, exposing instruction-level parallelism to the CPU and other such gory bits without which your code wouldn't be running as fast on modern CPUs.

Most of us regular folks however don't really write code like that, and I think for that sort of code, I don't think modern CPUs run as much faster than an ancient Core 2 Duo, as benchmarks would suggest, but we can expect results somewhat more like in the video I linked.

Congrats on your work getting used in Cinebench, but I can't help but ask you - what's your thoughts on your work getting used to basically benchmark every CPU under the sun by tech reviewers, who then make recommendations on whether to buy that CPU or another one. Looping back to the previous point, I think your code has quite likely very different performance characteristics than the sort of generic stuff most people end up running, and this sort of benchmarking creates an incentive for manufacturers to crank out CPUs that are good at running hyper-optimized path tracing code, while ignoring real-world performance. What are your thoughts on that?

It works splendidly for all those MBA's with golden parachutes.

It works for long enough to ride on the rise of the stock, and cash out.

Sure, the details would certainly have been different, but my argument is that the end result would not have been that different from what we saw playing out.

My quick 5 cents for what might have happened in the interim:

- Without a separate high-end offering in the form of the Itanium, Intel is quicker to adopt x86-64, and produce high-end server chips with extra RAS etc. features.

- POWER and SPARC, being the last holdouts in the RISC market in our actual timeline and outliving Itanium, would likely not have been affected much wrt. Itanium existing or not.

- SGI with MIPS would likely have been the first one to fold. Would SGI have pivoted to x86-64 & Linux sooner than they historically did, or would the company have gone bankrupt first?

- HP/Compaq with PA-RISC and Alpha is perhaps the most interesting question. HP did a lot of early VLIW/EPIC research with an eye towards developing a successor to PA-RISC. Would they have thrown that R&D away and selected to focus on either PA-RISC or Alpha after failing to secure Intel as a partner in the Itanium? Or would they have tried to develop something Itanium-like without Intel?

Another interesting what-if, if Itanium didn't exist, would instead 3rd-party manufacturing of high end chips (similar to TSMC today) have been developed sooner than historical? Keeping in mind that a large reason for the Itanium was accessing the semi process R&D and chip manufacturing prowess of Intel, as the thinking at the time was that tight (vertical!) integration of the chip design and manufacturing was a requirement for the highest end CPU's. And it was the spiraling costs and volume required of chip manufacturing that was the boat anchor around the necks of the RISC vendors moreso than the chip design itself.

SDI was real and led to the missile defense systems that the US has fielded today.

Agreed. Their problem is both, struggles with new EUV fab and don't have the org capable of working with customers.

Typical story of the one of many products of globalism where the standard traditional definition of monopoly has been nullified by it's massive supply chain spanning countries.