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by makapuf 2708 days ago
That and the fact that amiga was clean room design. IBM Pc was already old and even x86-64 won over itanium. Backwards compatibility has a cost but also gains. Amiga wasn't even compatible with c64.
2 comments

That and the fact that amiga was clean room design. IBM Pc was already

Well the PC wasn’t backward compatible with CP/M so that’s an odd critique to level at the Amiga.

Sure but "pc" at the time of amiga was already pc compatibles and at backward compatible with xt and IBM PC. Besides amiga was very optimized for 2D graphics. 3D story has been less rosey. But I would seriously welcome a new amiga. That wouldn't mean a specced up amigaos running pc. That would mean a radical new mobile architecture. Or Vr machine. Some fresh air On a radical, alien architecture. Belt CPU ? Gpu/CPU à la xeon phy ? Ram only? Dunno. Something crazy.
Itaninum only lost because Intel did the mistake to allow AMD to design x86 chips.
That would mean itanium could have won only by a monopoly and that with open competition, backwards compatibility won.
Itaninum also had an emulation mode, while not perfect, they could eventually improved it.

Backwards compatible didn't matter in the mobile world, or for those screaming for ARM laptops.

Sometimes we can't just have nice things.