| ▲ | bigstrat2003 9 hours ago |
| I remember at the time thinking it was really silly for Intel to release a 64-bit processor that broke compatibility, and was very glad AMD kept it. Years later I learned about kernel writing, and I now get why Intel tried to break with the old - the compatibility hacks piled up on x86 are truly awful. But ultimately, customers don't care about that, they just want their stuff to run. |
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| ▲ | drewg123 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It didn't help that Itanium was late, slow, and Intel/HP marketing used Itanium to kill off the various RISC CPUs, each of which had very loyal fans. This pissed off a lot of techies at the time. I was a HUGE DEC Alpha fanboy at the time (even helped port FreeBSD to DEC Alpha), so I hated Itanium with a passion. I'm sure people like me who were 64-bit MIPS and PA-RISC fanboys and fangrirls also existed, and also lobbied against adoption of itanic where they could. I remember when amd64 appeared, and it just made so much sense. |
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| ▲ | EasyMark 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This, if intel's compilers and architecture had been stellar and provided a x5 or x10 improvement it would have caught on. However no one in IT was fool enough to switch architectures over a 30-50% performance improvement that require switching hardware, compilers, and software and try to sell it to their bosses. | | |
| ▲ | axiolite 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > if intel's compilers and architecture had been stellar and provided a x5 or x10 improvement it would have caught on. That sounds like DEC Alpha to me, yet Alpha didn't take over the world. "Proprietary architecture" is a bad word, not something you want to base your future on. Without the Intel/AMD competition, x86 wouldn't have dominated for all these years. | |
| ▲ | kjs3 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I dunno if you meant it this way, but I've heard waaaay too many people say things like this meaning "if Intel compiler guys didn't suck...". They didn't, and don't (Intel C and Fortran compilers are to this day excellent). The simple fact is noone has proven yet that anyone can write compilers good enough to give VLIW overwhelmingly compelling performance outside of niche uses (DSPs, for example). I remember the Multiflow and Cydrome guys giving the same "it's the compiler, stupid" spiel in the mid-80s, and the story hasn't changed much except the details. We bought a Multiflow Trace...it was really nice, for certain problems, but not order-of-magnatude-faster, change-the-world nice, which was how it was sold. Now, to be clear, a lot of these folks and their ideas moved the state-of-the-art in compilers massively ahead, and are a big reason compilers are so good now. Really, really smart people worked this problem. |
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| ▲ | antod 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Wasn't much of the Athlon designed by laid-off DEC Alpha engineers that AMD snapped up? Makes sense that AMD64 makes sense to an Alpha fanboy :) | | |
| ▲ | kjs3 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah...look up Jim Keller. And AMD basically recycled the later Alpha system bus as the K7 bus to the extent there was very short lived buzz about having machines that could be either x86-64 or Alpha. |
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| ▲ | kjs3 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | PA-RISC fanboys and fangrirls Itanic wasn't exactly HP-PA v.3, but it was a kissing cousin. Most of the HP shops I worked with believed the rhetoric it was going to be a straightforward if not completely painless upgrade from the PA-8x00 gear they were currently using. Not so much. The MIPS 10k line on the other hand...sigh...what might have been. I remember when amd64 appeared, and it just made so much sense. And you were right. | | |
| ▲ | hawflakes 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Did the PA-RISC shops run their old PA-RISC code with the Aries emulator? One of the selling points for HP users was running old code via dynamic translation and x86 would just work on the hardware directly. Another fun fact I remember from working at HP was that later PA-RISC chips were fabbed at Intel because the HP-Intel agreement had Intel fabbing a certain amount of chips and since Merced was running behind... Intel-fabbed PA-RISC chips! https://community.hpe.com/t5/operating-system-hp-ux/parisc-p... |
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| ▲ | zokier 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It is worth noting that at the turn of the century x86 wasn't yet so utterly dominant yet. Alphas, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC and whatnot were still very much a thing. So that is part why running x86 software was not as high priority, and maybe even compatibility with PA-RISC would have been a higher priority. |
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| ▲ | Spooky23 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The writing was on the wall once Linux was a thing. I did alot of solution design in that period. The only times there were good business cases in my world for not-x86 were scenarios where DBAs and some vertical software required Sun, and occasionally AIX or HPUX for license optimization or some weird mainframe finance scheme. The cost structure was just bonkers. I replaced a big file server environment that was like $2M of Sun gear with like $600k of HP Proliant. | | |
| ▲ | michaelt 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | And by ~2000 there were also increasingly viable x86 offerings in CAD, 3D and video editing. You had AutoCAD, you had 3D Studio Max, you had After Effects, you had Adobe Premiere. And it was solid stuff - maybe not best-in-class, but good enough, and the price was right. |
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| ▲ | tliltocatl 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well, according to some IA-64 was a planned flop with the whole purpose of undermining HP's supercomputer division. | | |
| ▲ | cogman10 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Nah, HP made bank on their superdome computers even though they had very few clients. People paid through the nose for those. I worked on IA-64 stuff in 2011, long after I thought it was dead :D. The real thing that killed the division is Oracle announcing that they would no longer support IA-64. It just so happened that like 90% of the clients using Itanium were using it for oracle DBs. But by that point HP was already trying to get people to transition to more traditional x86 servers that they were selling. | | |
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| ▲ | unethical_ban 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is that true in 2000, especially as consumer PCs ramped up? |
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| ▲ | wvenable 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Intel might have been successful with the transition if they didn't decide to go with such radically different and real-world untested architecture for Itanium. |
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| ▲ | pixl97 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well that and Itanium was eyewateringly expensive and standard PC was much cheaper for similar or faster speeds. | | |
| ▲ | Tsiklon 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think Itanium was a remarkable success in some other ways. Intel utterly destroyed the workstation market with it. HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, Solaris. Itanium sounded the deathknell for all of them. The only Unix to survive with any market share is MacOS, (arguably because of its lateness to the party) and it has only relatively recently went back to a more bespoke architecture | | |
| ▲ | cryptonector a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | Absolutely not. Sun destroyed itself and Solaris, not Intel. The others were even more also-rans than Solaris. | |
| ▲ | icedchai 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'd argue it was Linux (on x86) and the dot-com crash that destroyed the workstation market, not Itanium. The early 2000s was awash in used workstation gear, especially Sun. I've never seen anyone with an Itanium box. | | |
| ▲ | phire 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | While Linux helped, I'd argue the true factor is that x86 failed to die as projected. The common attitude in the 80s and 90s was that legacy ISAs like 68k and x86 had no future. They had zero chance to keep up with the innovation of modern RISC designs. But not only did x86 keep up, it was actually outperforming many RISC ISAs. The true factor is out-of-order execution. Some RISC contemporary designs were out-of-order too (Especially Alpha, and PowerPC to a lesser extent), but both AMD and Intel were forced to go all-in on the concept in a desperate attempt to keep the legacy x86 ISA going. Turns out large out-of-order designs was the correct path (mostly OoO has side effect of being able to reorder memory accesses and execute them in parallel), and AMD/Intel had a bit of a head start, a pre-existing customer base and plenty of revenue for R&D. IMO, Itanium failed not because it was a bad design, but because it was on the wrong path. Itanium was an attempt to achieve roughly the same end goal as OoO, but with a completely in-order design, relying on static scheduling. It had massive amounts of complexity that let it re-order memory reads. In an alternative universe where OoO (aka dynamic scheduling) failed, Itanium might actually be a good design. Anyway, by the early 2000s, there just wasn't much advantage to a RISC workstation (or RISC servers). x86 could keep up, was continuing to get faster and often cheaper. And there were massive advantages to having the same ISA across your servers, workstations and desktops. | | |
| ▲ | chasil 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Bob Colwell mentions originally doing out of order design at Multiflow. He was a key player in the Pentium Pro out of order implementation. https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf "We should also say that the 360/91 from IBM in the 1960s was also out of order, it was
the first one and it was not academic, that was a real machine. Incidentally that is one of the
reasons that we picked certain terms that we used for the insides of the P6, like the
reservation station that came straight out of the 360/91." Here is his Itanium commentary: "Anyway this chip architect
guy is standing up in front of this group promising the moon and stars. And I finally put my
hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of
performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut
me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said,
wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a
compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my
simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did
30 lines of code”. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this
architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not
mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not
here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let’s move on"." |
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| ▲ | tyingq 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think the idea there is that it's less direct. Intel's lack of interest in a 64-bit x86 spawned AMD x64. The failure of Itanium then let that Linux/AMD x64 kill off the workstation market, and the larger RISC/Unix market. Linux on 32 bit X86 or 64 bit RISC alone was making some headway there, but the Linux/x64 combo is what enabled the full kill off. |
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| ▲ | seabrookmx 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | HP-UX was one of the most popular operating systems to run on Itanium though? | | |
| ▲ | icedchai 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | HP was also one of the few companies to actually sell Itanium systems! They were also the last to stop selling them. They ported both OpenVMS and HP-UX to Itanium. | | |
| ▲ | tyingq 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, largely because they made it difficult for customers to stay on PA-RISC, then later, because their competitors were dying off...and if you were in the market for stodgy RISC/Unix there weren't many other choices. |
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| ▲ | kronicum2025 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And such a terrible architecture for the time. |
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