Kevin G (kevin.delete@this.cubitdesigns.com) on October 6, 2013 8:55 am wrote:
> David Hess (davidwhess.delete@this.gmail.com) on October 5, 2013 6:35 pm wrote:
> > Kevin G (kevin.delete@this.cubitdesigns.com) on September 27, 2013 9:47 am wrote:
> > > David Hess (davidwhess.delete@this.gmail.com) on September 27, 2013 8:06 am wrote:
> > > >
> > > > 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.
> > >
> > > Well two of competing RISC architectures, PA-RISC and DEC Alpha, were killed off due to
> > > internal business politics of the HP-Compaq merger. HP phased out PA-RISC themselves but
> > > Alpha was spun off from Compaq to avoid FTC botching the merger. Compaq, partially to
> > > avoid more oversight with the pending HP merger, sold off the Alpha line to Intel.
> > >
> > > That left POWER/PowerPC under the AIM alliance, the declining MIPS, SPARC under Sun in the desktop/server
> > > markets. Of those, MIPs floats around in the embedded market now where as the ARM has emerged
> > > from the embedded market to be a potential player in mainstream computing. PowerPC lost Apple,
> > > lost the console market and POWER exists as IBM's server chip of choice. SPARC nearly died as
> > > Sun spiraled downward only to have a recent renaissance under Oracle.
> > >
> > > Itanium in retrospect managed to gain the share of the computing market that was once reserved for the
> > > two architectures that were deprecated in its favor. Had
> > > PA-RISC and Alpha users not been given a migration
> > > path to Itanium, its place in the market would have been killed off when x86-64 arrived.
> >
> > MIPS and Alpha were still used in workstations when Itanium was announced though, weren't they?
> >
> > What I remember is the announcement of Itanium either sinking the sales of the workstation
> > processors that it was going to compete with or intimidating those companies into freezing
> > development. Compaq (Alpha) and Silicon Graphics (MIPS) were who I was thinking of.
>
> The workstation market was starting to migrate to x86 when Itanium first shipped, partially because Intel had
> a migration plan from x86 to Itanium down the road. Though when Itanium was announced, Alpha based and MIPs
> based workstations were indeed popular. In fact, I have an old Alpha AXP system floating around my place.

Alpha workstations were far less popular than SPARC or even PA-RISC workstations; not sure how it compared to RS/6000 which also didn't sell too well.
Demand was so low that around 1999 Compaq (or still Digital?) stopped designing new workstation models and instead started to sell small servers with "desktop kits" as workstations.
Later on, the rest of RISC vendors followed the same path, but Alpha was the first to give up on separate design, years before the rest.

>
> Silicon Graphics did announce support for Itanium rather early and shipped several workstations
> based upon it.

I don't think so. I remember one huge deskside model, but nothing desktop. And this deskside was too expensive to be called workstation.

> They're one of the few companies that phased out a RISC architecture
> in favor of Itanium who didn't have some sort of ties to the Itanium design.