Comment by mgerdts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgerdts | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t think it was Itanium that killed SPARC. On workstations it was improved reliability of Windows and to some extent Linux. Sun tried to combat this with lower cost systems like the Ultra 5, Ultra 10, and Blade 100. Sun fanatics dismissed these systems because they were to PC like. PC fanatics saw them as overpriced and unfamiliar. With academic pricing, a $3500 Ultra 10 with 512 MB of RAM and an awful IDE drive ran circles around a $10000 HP C180 with 128 MB of RAM and an OK SCSI drive because the Sun never had to hit swap. I think Dell and HP x86 PC workstations with similar specs as the Ultra 10 were a bit cheaper.

On servers, 32 bit x86 was doing wonders for small workloads. AMD64 quickly chipped away at the places where 1-4 processor SPARC would have previously been used.

Fair point, Itanium's impact on SPARC might be less than I stated, but Alpha is very clearly documented.

I think that Itanium had zero impact on anything (besides draining Intel for money) due to high cost and low performance.

It could not run x86 apps faster than x86 cpus, so it didn't compete in the MS Windows world. Itanium was a headache for compiler writers as it was very difficult to optimize for, so it was difficult to get good performance out of Itanium and difficult to emulate x86.

Itanium was introduced after the dot-com crash, so the marked was flooded with cheap slightly used SPARC systems, putting even more pressure on price.

This is unlike when Apple introduced Macs with PowerPC cpus: they had much higher performance than the 68040 cpu they replaced. PowerPC was price competetive and easy to write optimizing compilers for.

Itanium itself did nothing. But Itanium announcement killed basically killed MIPS, Alpha and PA-RISC. Why invest money into MIPS and Alpha when Intanium is gone come out and destroy everything with its superior performance.

So ironically announcing Itanium was genius, but then they should have just canceled it.

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