alt Hacker NewsWhen it comes to Itanium all I can think of is how I wish I could have an Alpha. And how no one should care about Itanium.
It’s the product of companies bent on doing all the wrong things.
Replies
MarekKnapek • yesterday at 4:44 AM
Wasn't there a problem with Alpha, that it had too weak memory model or something? Think of atomic instructions with multi CPU system. Or do I remember something wrong?
speed_spread • yesterday at 2:40 AM
Alpha was great but that wasn't enough against the convenience of just running an x86 box. It didn't find a niche quickly enough. ARM survived because they were low power. POWER survived because IBM is one big niche. MIPS died and reincarnated into RISC-V. I have no idea where Alpha would have gone had it not been dropped.
It took longer than necessary, but in what ways do you think an Intel Core-derived chip is different from what an “Intel Alpha” would have been?
Taking for granted that hardware backcompat (Itanium had this, too!) was a starting requirement…