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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Anything in Intel that's not x86 gets killed by internal politics. Somehow Intel didn't understand that when they bought it.

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Perfect example with their best replacement for x86: the i960. It was one of most impressive compromises I've seen from the time period in terms of speed, reliability, and security.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960

Some variants are still in production mostly for legacy purposes but not the one (MC) I wanted. Too bad.

http://www.intel.com/design/i960/index.htm

Why have you posted that link?!?

Now I will have to research about BiiN and Intel iAPX 432. :)

Start with the classic!

Performance Effects of Architectural Complexity in the Intel 432

https://www.princeton.edu/~rblee/ELE572Papers/Fall04Readings...

Thanks!

Yep, yep, the other important one. Of course, one could read this along with the i960 and System/38 papers to see if any good ideas pop up.

I posted it a bunch. I usually post it, Burroughs B5000, and capability-systems (includes AS/400 predecessor) links [1] together. Intel's i432 was an amazing attempt to clean-slate the machine of future. Safe, manageable, and consistent from the ground up. Just overdid it in terms of hardware requirements and certain components should've been firmware for easier improvements.

The i960/BiiN system improved on that by greatly reducing complexity of the hardware. It was a fast RISC system, had all kinds of error detection, supported HA configuration, and had 432's object-descriptor protections. Object- and page-oriented system. I expect our computer security and reliability situation on Wintel might have turned out differently given what highly-secure systems did with x86's shitty segment/paging/ring combo and HA with lock-step.

Note: A Slashdot article on legacy systems once knocked the F-35 for using old i960 CPU's. Thought that was stupid idea. I think designer was probably thinking too many steps ahead with the market ruining it for him/her.

[1] http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/levy/capabook/index.html

[2] http://craigchamberlain.com/library/blackhat-2007/Moyer/Extr...

My take is Intel doesn't really understand markets where they need to fight for market share. They invest in something, it doesn't become a large profit business in a few years so they kill it. Customers see this and passively/actively avoid Intel products when possible.

Passive avoidance: Customer doesn't even think to consider what products Intel is offering. Active avoidance: Tries not to spec Intel products when possible.

The internal politics part comes from this scenario. Say someone makes a good proposal, spend $20 million. In return a get product line worth 100 million yr gross and $40 million net. Manager thinks, $100 million a year isn't going to get me a VP position at a $50 billion dollar company.

> Say someone makes a good proposal, spend $20 million. In return a get product line worth 100 million yr gross and $40 million net. Manager thinks, $100 million a year isn't going to get me a VP position at a $50 billion dollar company.

You could also be describing execs at Apple.

Friend of mine worked at Apple in the period between Jobs 1.0 and Jobs 2.0. He described an environment of management 'wolf packs' slowly destroying everything. Stuff like this, guy gets promoted as a manger of a group. Proceeds to force out current employees and replace them with his associates. Then abuse the review process to boost one of those to a higher position in the company. Playing the game right they all move up in 18 to 24 months. All fun and good except the groups they pass through are trashed in the process.

Eh, don’t forget the external forces. Remember Itanium vs AMD’s x86_64?

Itanium died because it was a very niche architecture Intel was working on their desktop/common server x64 line when AMD came out with Athlon64 which more or less won because it's desktop performance over the Pentium 4. Itanium was a RISC-y endeavour by Intel and it had it's problems but you can't really say it died because of x86_64.

Itanium was a RISC-y endeavour by Intel and it had it's problems but you can't really say it died because of x86_64. Microsoft adopted it and dropped IA-64 like a hot potato. Intel dropped Yamhill and other projects that attempted to bring IA-64 to the desktop as soon as they realized MS wanted x86-64. Performance didn't factor in because AMD would have never had the chance to provide the world all the CPUs it wanted (supply constraints)

I think you are mixing a few things here Yamhill was supposed to be a x86_64 CPU (under license from AMD) it was dropped in favor of promoting Intels own IA64 instead. http://www.geek.com/chips/intels-otellini-says-no-to-yamhill...

Microsoft dropped support for IA64 only a few years ago with Windows Server 2008 R2 being the last OS that supported it due to the limited market share. This was quite long after Intel has killed IA64 internally on it's own.

Itanium was a trojan horse to get their rivals to give up on MIPS/Alpha/UltraSparc development. As soon as those CPUs lost all traction, Intel dumped Itanium as well. Intel was never serious about the Itanium. Considering how performance sensitive it ought to be, Intel chose to build Itaniums on older manufacturing processes. The fact that Itanium performance was hopeless should not have been a surprise.

Intel chose to build Itaniums on older manufacturing processes

They didn't have any choice. Itaniums were big, and their defect rate on newer processes was too high to get any yield on chips that size.

Itanium was EPIC, pretty much the opposite of RISC. Intel bet on compilers being good enough to tell the CPU which branches it could execute in parallel, and lost that bet.

Er... those are orthogonal concepts. Itanium had a simple instruction set with primarily register-register operations. The explicit ILP part has nothing to do with that.

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