David Hess (davidwhess.delete@this.gmail.com) on September 27, 2013 8:06 am wrote:
> bakaneko (nyan.delete@this.hyan.wan) on September 26, 2013 3:06 pm wrote:
> >
> > What I don't get is how Intel got the idea
> > that building Itanium would be successful.
> >
> > I'm reading through the wikipedia entry
> > for i860, which Intel worked on half a
> > decade earlier, and it is VLIW and it had
> > the same negative downsides from shoving
> > prediction into the compiler.
> >
> > So why did Intel think Itanium was going
> > to be any different?
>
> If AMD had not been successful with AMD64 and Opteron, then Itanium would have been the successor
> to x86-32 or so Intel planned. Wasn't that the reason for including support to run legacy x86-32
> binaries? Intel's customers had other ideas however which AMD was able to capitalize on.

That's besides the point, Intel had data that
VLIW sucked. Hard. They may not have been able
to pinpoint why, but they had data that showed
that VLIW designs don't compete even before
Itanium.

There is also the other problem - HPs and
Intels goals don't seem to fit together. Intel
was targeting a much broader market than HP.

So why would Intel rely on anything HP as base
for their much broader needs than what HPs
design cared about?

> As measured by how many competing RISC architectures bit the dust, Itanium could be considered a success even
> while languishing. ARM threatens Intel now having followed the same path Intel took through the low end to
> threaten established microprocessors that held the workstation, minicomputer, and mainframe markets.

The ISA race is just newspaper jargon. These
RISCs weren't necessary because there was a race,
but because the few chip companies out there
didn't have the flexibility to support all the
products which were needed, so companies had to
come up with their own infrastructure to build
and sell products that were necessary at the
time. And this included CPU designs.

The interview about SPARC (linked in another
thread) makes it pretty clear. Sun didn't get an
ISA or 'customer lock-in' from SPARC, but the
freedom to build big systems without waiting for
other companies to cook up their half of a
solution. If they ever got one done.

There is no harm in letting ISAs bite the dust
after the job is done. There are no points for
being the last ISA standing.