alt Hacker NewsItanium was bonkers in lots of ways—very cool in others.
But this market segmentation idea just seems absolutely insane to me in a way I’ve never had anyone satisfactorily explain.
It requires Intel to voluntarily destroy the commodity economics that put their CPUs on a rocket ship to domination.
It’s as if they actually bought into the RISC FUD from the 1990’s that x86 was unscalable, exactly when it was taking its biggest leaps.
Replies
> It’s as if they actually bought into the RISC FUD from the 1990’s that x86 was unscalable, exactly when it was taking its biggest leaps.
That's exactly what was happening.
Though it helps to realise that this argument was taking place inside Intel around 1997. The Pentium II is only just hitting the market, it wasn't exactly obvious that x86 was right in the middle making its biggest leaps.
RISC was absolutely dominating the server/workstation space, this was slightly before the rise of the cheap x86 server. Intel management was desperate to break into the server/workstation space, and they knew they needed a high end RISC cpu. It was kind of general knowledge in the computer space at the time that RISC was the future.
Well, TBH it wasn't all FUD - hanging on to x86 eventually (much later) came back to bite them when x86 CPUs weren't competitive for tablets and smartphones, leading to Apple developing their own ARM-based RISC CPUs (which run circles around the previous x86 CPUs) and dumping Intel altogether.
They were trying to compete with Sun and IBM in the server space (SPARC and Power) and thought that they needed a totally pro architecture (which Itanium was). The baggage of 32-bit x86 would have just slowed it all down. However having an x86-64 would have confused customers in the middle.
Think back then it was all about massive databases - that was where the big money was and x86 wasn't really setup for the top end load patterns of databases (or OLAP data lakes).