| ▲ | pjmlp 3 days ago |
| Itanium only failed because AMD for various reasons was able to come up with AMD64 and rug pull Intel's efforts. In an alternative universe without AMD64, Intel would have kept pushing Itanium while sorting out its issues, HP-UX was on it, and Windows XP as well. |
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| ▲ | pjc50 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Other way round: the only way any company other than Intel was able to get a new instruction set launched into the PC space was because Intel face-planted so hard with Itanium, and AMD64 was the architecture developers actually wanted to use - just make the registers wider and have more of them, and make it slightly more orthogonal. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Developers get to use the architectures OEM vendors make available to them. | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but the fact remains that AMD64 won in the market, despite the incumbent near-monopoly "Wintel" advantages. | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The whole premise is that it only won because AMD exists, and was allowed to come up with it. People don't read comments before replying? | | |
| ▲ | Joker_vD 3 days ago | parent [-] | | In that different world, Transmeta would actually succeed in the market of x86-compatible CPUs and, perhaps, would even come up with their own 64-bit extension. Itanium would still flop. Or maybe, if the push came to shove, the desktops would switch to something entirely different like Alpha. Or ARM! Such event would likely force ARM to come up with their AArch64 several years sooner than it actually happened. | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Transmeta wasn't a success story to start with, died before Itanium, and Intel is one of the patent holders. |
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| ▲ | pajko 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The first generation was complete garbage. Itanium 2 came too late and it did not get widespread due to wrong business decisions and marketing. By the time it could have been successful, AMD64 was out. And even then Intel targeted only the same high-end enterprise market segment, when they have implemented 64-bit on Xeon: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/intel-expanding-64-b... |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 2 days ago | parent [-] | | That is the whole point, assume there was no AMD64 to start with. |
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| ▲ | bell-cot 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Suggested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#History With how long it took Intel to ship expensive, incompatible, so-so performance ia64 chips - your theory needs an alternate universe where Intel has no competitors, ever, to take advantage of the obvious market opportunity. |
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| ▲ | bombcar 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It was also an era where people were happily stating on PAE 32 bit x86 rather than pay the price and performance premium for Itanium. 4gb of RAM existed but many many systems weren’t even close to it yet. | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't need suggestions for a time I live through, I am in computers since the 1980's. Without AMD, there was no alternative in the PC world, It was already the first 64 bit version of Windows XP. Since we're providing suggestions in computing history, I assume you can follow the dates, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions#Windows_XP... | | |
| ▲ | bell-cot 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Without AMD, ... Perhaps? I don't know enough to judge whether one of the other companies working on IA-32 compatible processors could plausibly have stepped in - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_IA-32_compatibl... It's true that most of those would have lacked the resources to replicate AMD's feat with AMD64. OTOH, AMD itself had to buy out NexGen to produce their K6. Without AMD and/or AMD64, there'd be plenty of larger players who might decide to fill the void. | | |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | kelnos 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| We can't know for sure, but my guess is that Itanium still could have failed. I could imagine an alternative universe where, even with HP-UX and WinXP running on it, no one wanted to deal with porting their application software. And its emulation of 32-bit code (both in hardware and in software) was atrocious, so running existing, unported code wouldn't really take off either. Eventually Intel gives up after motherboard/desktop/laptop makers can't build a proper market for it. Maybe Intel then decides to go back and do something similar to what AMD did with x86_64. Maybe Intel just gives up on 64-bit and tries to convince people it's not necessary, but then starts losing market share to other companies with viable 64-bit ISAs, like IMB's POWER64 or Sun's SPARC64 or whatever. Obviously we can't know, but I think my scenario is at least as likely as yours. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 2 days ago | parent [-] | | If there was no alternative way to run Windows with more than 4 GB, eventually they would no matter what. Considering that PAE was a gimmick anyway. |
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