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Comment by jasoneckert | Hacker News Reader

I'd be cautious about the use of "We Can't Save It" in the title of this article. This industry has a history of big players losing steam and then making big comebacks.

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Including Intel themselves, who came back from the Pentium 4 Prescott design disaster, late dual-core support, and late x86_64 support. And then promptly ate everyone's lunch with the Core 2 Duo and ruled unchallenged for a decade.

And, of course, including AMD.

That and if you asked 20 years ago what CPUs our desktops will be running, not only would Intel not necessarily have been a popular answer (Many compiler books were written around that time, giving us a guess as to what the academic groupthink was, and they generally treat x86 as a weird ISA soon-to-be obsolete or dead) but Intel's main architectural competitor (ARM) might not've even been mentioned at all.

The answer would have likely been SuperH and Transmeta, both way dead.

Things change fast.

I would not have guessed SuperH, but I did not use Dreamcast or Jornada. 32-bit CPU with 16-bit instructions seems weird.

VLIW had a lot of hype. DSPs had already proven it, and Itanium, Transmeta, and various embedded processors were using it.

As a mostly Mac-user back then, I liked PowerPC, and POWER3 was leading the way to 64-bit, but I wasn’t expecting PCs to switch to PowerPC. The RISC systems had not all been executed in the face of the not-yet-released threat of Itanium. I was expecting the diversity to continue, for cross-architecture programming to be the rule and not the exception.

I read the dying headline and all it says to me is "buy more Intel stock".

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