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The worst thing about Itanium is that it killed DEC Alpha, high-performance MIPS and some other arches I keep forgetting about.
It's funny thinking back to the hype cycle of Itanium back in the heady days where performance was doubling every year, desktop was king and this was the future . Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the future. Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always.
I still get confused whether the real name is Itanium or Itanic
The worst thing about Itanium is that it killed DEC Alpha, high-performance MIPS and some other arches I keep forgetting about.
It guzzled power. This was the biggest problem, not solvable in its lifetime with its resources.
"According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible."
The Itanium sales forecasts never fail to make me laugh. Aged like the finest wine: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
Contrast with the notorious IAE solar forecast: https://zenmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/iea-vs-reality-... Statistics and modeling are complicated, granted. But when your model diverges from reality 5 years in a row, perhaps you should just extrapolate the current line next time around. (In the case of the Itanic, that would have been the line at 0. Still a better forecast than what they did!)
The worst thing about Itanium is that it killed DEC Alpha, high-performance MIPS and some other arches I keep forgetting about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always. I’m not particularly confused about Intel’s perspective on compatibility: Even at the time, there were several examples of successful platform CPU transitions across architectural “full breaks”. Apple going from 68k to PowerPC is the closest analogy for Intel, and if the Itanium performance and software (compiler) story had played out as Intel envisioned they likely…
Same company that completely missed the boat on mobile not that many years later. Intel have consistently made serious mistakes in their strategic direction. Fumbling 64bit, turning Apple down on mobile, missing GPU/AI. They are basically just building a better version of the same product they were selling 20 years ago… so much opportunity missed here.
The worst thing about Itanium is that it killed DEC Alpha, high-performance MIPS and some other arches I keep forgetting about.
While it might sound contrarian, Alpha actually deserved to die. It guzzled power. This was the biggest problem, not solvable in its lifetime with its resources. "According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
Huge box with a huge PSU. And we had some cheapo desktop HPs with dual Pentium2(3? (the card edge ones)) at like 450 or 533.
Which basically ran circles and sipped power by comparison. Don't remember the exact numbers but only 2 per 15A circuit; with 4 of the x86 per.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's the case that they wanted to believe that, because the other story, that all the major "big iron" companies would be absolutely and totally forever wrecked by stupid free Linux running on stupid cheap whiteboxes was simply too horrible to envision.
Data center computing being dominated by commodity Linux running on commodity x86 PC architecture—for which the best CPUs were not commodities, but rather made exclusively by Intel—was likely the best of all possible worlds for them! Going back to at least the i432, Intel seems to have had a deep vein of “mainframe envy” in their culture and strategic thinking. It seems that somehow the market (and a bit of trailblaz…
Direct quote from Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432
""" Intel's iAPX432 was intended to be Intel's major design for the 1980s. Unlike the 8086, which was designed the following year as a successor to the 8080, the iAPX 432 was a radical departure from Intel's previous designs meant for a different market niche...
Referred to as a "micromainframe", the iAPX 432 was designed to be programmed entirely in high-level languages. """
Folklore describes the 8086 as a stop-gap design, an extension of the popular (but tiny) 8080 CPU. The "real" design project at Intel was the i432, which supported object-oriented programming and was THE FUTURE OF ALL COMPUTING.
A cut-down version of the object oriented support was carried over into the x86 architecture, in its segmented memory model and page-description registers. You're welcome.
The Itanium sales forecasts never fail to make me laugh. Aged like the finest wine: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
Intel wanted in on this space and didn't want AMD to be able to produce compatible parts so... enter EPIC [1]. The projections (as you point to) were wildly optimistic. Of course the whole thing was heavily delayed, produced in small volume, offered limited to no performance gain, required a ground up write of pretty much everything and was super expensive. What could go wrong?
What did AMD do? It just invented 64 bit extensions to x86 (ie x86-64). Was it ideal? No. You probably wouldn't design an instruction set and architecture this way if you were starting from nothing but you aren't starting from nothing. AMD released the wildly successful Opteron (and Athlon 64) and for 5-10 years completley ate Intel's lunch. Cheap parts, good performance, easy migration part, etc. Intel got to use these extensions by the same licensing agreement.
This coincided with the Gigahertz wars on the desktop front. From the Pentium for almost a decade Intel focused on Gigahertz and once thought they could run this up all the way to 10GHz+. We know how that went. Clock speed was a key marketing bullet point. AMD processors had higher IPC but that (at that time) was a harder sell.
About the time Opteron came out the Gigahertz wars were hitting the 3GHz barrier and Intel was stuck. At the same time their mobile parts used a completely different architecture. Thsi was Centrino with the Core Duo processors. These had much higher IPC (than Pentium lines) and more power efficiency. Some early enthusiasts constructed desktops from these mobile chips and the results were great.
Losing out to Opteron/Athlon and hitting the 3GHz barrier ultimately forced Intel to abandon their desktop architecture in favor of Centrino. Intel hung on as long as they could to milk some extra profit but eventually Core Duo was the future and this ultimately because the foundation for the Core processors we have today (but by now there have been many revisions). It might be more accurate to describe the Pentium years as the Netburst architecture years (IIRC).
But the lesson here is that a complete rewrite was an almost fatal mistake for Intel. It's almost always a mistake. You can't ignore what's there now and your desire to lock out competition doesn't necessarily translate to something customers actually want or need.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instructio...