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...