Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the future.
Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always.
Of course, it's also possible that by that point Sun was already paralysed by infighting between various splinter groups, with no big bad DEC to fight against.
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 would have been fine.
But as for ubiquity, I’m befuddled. As far as I’ve been able to determine—having lived through it and followed many retrospective threads like this looking for new evidence—Intel had no plans on any useful timeline to turn Itanium into a (non-workstation) desktop or laptop chip. Did they really think the market would stay bifurcated between “big iron” architectures and x86 personal machines for another decade? I can’t imagine they would have believed that.
Oh but they did :)
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 trailblazing into x86-64 by AMD) saved them from themselves.
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.
I think they knew they could fall back on x86 if everything went wrong - but what they did NOT expect was x86-64 to just smash everything. That caught them on backfoot.
They are basically just building a better version of the same product they were selling 20 years ago… so much opportunity missed here.
But even that goes back to the P6->P5->486->386->286->8086->8088->8080->8008->CTC lineage of 50+yrs. It literally just cuts out the few years of the abandoned NetBurst architecture.
I can. The x86 hegemony was overpowering in the PC space but the moment you left that corner of the market we had a lot more ISA diversity then than in the following years. In a world that seemed to have no problem with Macs on PowerPC, PCs on x86, and workstations/servers on SPARC/MIPS/PA-RISC, just consolidating workstations and servers probably seemed reasonable. You can even see an analog in the way we've kept x86 on "real computers" while ARM has dominated mobile. IMHO the only reason it didn't work out is because workstations and servers merged with PCs.
> The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel—and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level.
> It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above. The next level was the basement, in fact. Hopefully Intel won't come up with any more bright ideas like the Itanium. We can't afford to excavate another level down.
The DEC Alpha architecture was planned for 25 years and it certainly was not technical barriers that killed the Alpha 21464.
DEC should have bought MIPS, and ported VMS to it.
Had they made that decision, they might still exist.
So when samples arrived they were 2-3 years later than they should have been and MIPs had made some headway in the same space.
DEC - actually Bob Supnik - decided that even though Prism was the better arch, MIPS products would bring in revenue more quickly.
Which was true. But... then Prism was killed, which led to a mass walkout. The remains were resurrected a year later with some updates as Alpha. But by then it was too late for that particular market.
Prism was a solid arch - some quirks, but nothing unworkable. And very, very fast.
But it was a workstation-grade processor, not a mainstream PC-grade processor.
DEC completely failed to understand the PC market, and it's not obvious what would have happened if Prism had survived. IMO it would have gone the way of MIPS anyway, because the workstation market was already being squeezed hard, and the PC and Mac markets had already made their choices.
It might have had a good run against SPARC for a decade or so, but that would have been it.
DEC's terminals? killed by PCs. The VAX lineup? killed by RISC chips, and the VAX 9000 consumed a huge chunk of their cash reserves before embarrassingly being rendered obsolete by their own NVAX.
This was a time of change from minicomputers to microcomputers and DEC made costly decision after costly decision. They kept selling off profitable "non-core" portions of the business that in the process incurred a loss.
Not defending Itanium. But the average article on computer architecture has been garbage for decades now, it's fascinating.
In this case, that means AMD showing up with the first x86-compatible 64-bit CPUs killed Itanium dead. For big software projects already running on x86, there were 2 options:
- Port everything to a new architecture that only looked good in specific benchmarks, cross your fingers, and hope for the best.
- Keep running your code on new 64-bit CPUs that were backward compatible with your existing code, then recompile for 64-bit as you got around to it.
As a bonus, amd64/x86-64 CPUs were faster than the P4 chips that practically needed 3 phase power to boot up.
It was kind of a no brainer.
Alpha was clearly the future -- and Itanic ruined Alpha. We didn't even get to see it live on inside some other corporate sarlacc.
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/07/18/revisiting-the-intel...
I'm not sure that was Itanium's only problem. Intel's Itanium launch focused on a market that was not captured by the so-called "Wintel" monopoly: high performance servers. The software support needed in this market was relatively narrow. Nevertheless, it failed there too.
The biggest issue with Itanium is that the juice was never worth the squeeze. It was expensive. The cost to migrate your existing 64bit systems never made sense. So, you might ask, what about 32-bit shops that needed to make the leap to 64 bits? Well, by the time intel and its vendors started getting costs under control, the AMD Opteron hit the scene with commodity 64bit hardware that had the added benefit of full backwards compatibility. And that pretty much killed it.
Linus Torvalds in 2003: https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/x86.html
>Itanium 2 doesn't hold a candle to a P4 on any real-world benchmarks.
It was quite a bit worse than that. If you ignore the horror of IBM vendor lock-in, which in retrospect made the whole thing untenable, and the overpriced nature of the systems, MCA was a fine thing for its time. The PS/2s had some nice features. They were compatible with everyone's DOS and Windows stuff, even if IBM would have preferred you use OS/2, and so on.
Itanium was a piece of crap, even if you could somehow ignore the cost and lock-in.
Counterexample: GPU compute.