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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

The big problem for them is AMD. Anytime they do something stupid (Itanium) they have a competitor right there to take advantage of it.

Same problem IBM had. They didn’t like people using “their“ PC architecture, so they decided to make the MCA bus and other proprietary stuff. Force everyone to do what they want.

IBM‘s AMD was Compaq and all the clone makers. They all got together and used their power to prevent the market from being screwed up by IBM.

I could really see Intel wanting to make that kind of move but it never would’ve worked in reality.

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Itanium was not stupid. Some genuine effort behind it could have changed this whole story.

I'm curious why you think there was not effort behind ia64.

I still think ia64 was sunk by the let-the-compiler-do-it tarpit. There were ambivalent aspects such as, at the time, questions of power or chip area. But things like memory latency are just not predictable enough to do strictly in-order pipelines. OoO won.

Not the OP, but share a similar point of view.

Had AMD not been around with AMD64, the industry would have had to get it working no matter what, HP and Microsoft were already on the Itanium train, and if production of x86 got slowly replaced by Itanium that was it, Windows and HP-UX would drag the ecosystems into it, and eventually the remaining issues would be sorted out.

Wouldn't the world have jumped to Alpha instead? If you're going to switch the entire architecture, might as well switch to one which is sane.

Windows on Alpha didn't went far, so I guess no.

UNIX systems, I also doubt, as we were still in the days each vendor had their own CPUs.

No. HP was behind Itanium. In fact, it was basically their idea in the first place. I'm still not entirely sure why Intel went along although I suspect at least some of it was getting away from various x86 cross-licensing agreements.

Intel bought Alpha and killed it to eliminate the competition.

HP bought DEC by way of Compaq. Some DEC Alpha assets ended up with Intel (e.g. Hudson MA). But your statement doesn't make sense in general.

My issue with this alternative history is Intel’s consumer roadmap for Itanium, or rather its complete lack of one.

AFAICT, they expected Itanium to own the high end server/HPC market, while 32-bit x86 would continue supporting PC’s for another decade.

That seems remarkably short-sighted in retrospect.

I'm inclined to agree. Intel would have been loathe to go the 64-bit x86 route on their own. But a somewhat resurgent AMD pretty much forced their hand given the sorry state of Itanium development. Absent AMD, I'm pretty sure they'd have found a path to a "good enough" Itanium to sell successfully.

For what it's worth, I followed Itanium as an IT industry analyst and wrote a short book recently on the topic. https://s3.amazonaws.com/bitmasons.com/docs/Lessons+from+the...

Right. Even if Itanium worked better and was released to consumers AMD might have done the same thing and still won.

The compilers were fine, even if not producing maximally optimized code. Intel’s decision to add x86 compatibility circuitry to the die was probably the fatal one, it slowed everything down; made for terrible comparisons with existing x86 performance and generally signalled a lack of confidence. Something like Rosetta was out of the question, but they could have just had better transitioning tools for those code bases that couldn’t be recompiled easily.

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