alt Hacker NewsIn approx. 2000 to 2002, 2003 or around then, there was a theoretical dream that Itanium based workstations would become a real mass market thing, but it obviously never caught on.
Intel never made Itanium CPUs cheap enough to realistically purchase and Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers (the same companies that were making really nice boards for the 1 GHz to 1.2 GHz socketed Pentium 3 with 512KB cache and the first generations of Pentium 4).
Also the performance sucked. This was before AMD64 existed on the corporate desktop or home desktop.
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> Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers
Supermicro and pretty sure Tyan offered Itanium motherboards.
From what I remember the Itanium was always harped on as too complex and too power hungry for mainstream while offering abysmal x86 emulation which soured its adoption. It had a niche in certain industries like HPC and high reliability. AMD's x64 architecture launched only 2 years after Itanium launched and pretty much destroyed any future for Itanium.
Had AMD not come out with AMD64, and Itanium would eventually prevail, as there was no other alternative coming from Intel.
Yeah, that was real soon now in the mid-90s – I remember reading Byte in high school and they’d be talking about how Alpha, MIPS, etc. workstations were doomed and then it kept getting pushed back – maybe 98/99, early in the next century, … and then AMD launched x86-64 and everyone just stopped pretending Itanium was ever going to happen.
It totally worked! Took out like four decent risc competitors with just a little FOMO