[l1k]

A lot of RISC CPU arches which were popular in the 1990's declined because their promulgators stopped investments and bet on switching to IA64 instead. Around the year 2000, VLIW was seen as the future and all the CISC and RISC architectures were considered obsolete.

That strategic failure by competitors allowed x86 to grow market share at the high end, which benefited Intel more than the money lost on Itanium.

[ghaff]

It's more complicated than that.

Sun didn't slow down on UltraSPARC or make an Itanium side bet. IBM did (and continues to) place their big hardware bet on Power--Itanium was mostly a cover your bases thing. I don't know what HP would have done--presumably either gone their own way with VLIW or kept PA-RISC going.

Pretty much all the other RISC/Unix players had to go to a standard processor; some were already on x86. Intel mostly recovered from Itanium specifically but it didn't do them any favors.

[sliken]

Actually, they did. Intel promised aggressive delivery schedule, performance ramp, and performance. The industry took it hook, line, and sinker. While AMD decided not to limit 64 bit to the high end and brought out x86-64.

Sun did a port IA64 port of solaris, which is definitely an itanium side bet.

HP was involved in the IA64 effort and definitely was planning on the replacement of pa-risc from day 1.

[davidgay]

> HP was involved in the IA64 effort and definitely was planning on the replacement of pa-risc from day 1.

As my memory remembers and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium agrees, Itanium originated at HP. So yes, a replacement for pa-risc from day 1, but even more so...

[rodgerd]

Another way to look at the Itanic is that HP somehow conned Intel into betting the farm on building HP-PA3 for HP. Which is pretty impressive.

[panick21_]

Sun didn't slow down on UltraSPARC but they were just not very good at designing processors.

[foobiekr]

This isn't really true. IBM/Motorola need to own the failure of POWER and PowerPC and MIPS straight up died on the performance side. Sun continued with Ultrasparc.

It wasn't that IA64 killed them, it's that they were getting shaky and IA64 appealed _because_ of that. Plus the lack of a 64bit x86.

[userbinator]

Plus the lack of a 64bit x86.

If you look at the definitions of various structures and opcodes in x86 you'll notice gaps that would've been ideal for a 64-bit expansion, so I think they had a plan besides IA64, but AMD beat them to it (and IMHO with a far more inelegant extension.)

[andrekandre]

  > and IMHO with a far more inelegant extension

what could they have done that would have been better?

[panick21_]

Its simply economics Intel had the volume. Sun and SGI simply didn't have the economics to invest the same amount, and they were also not chip company, the both didn't invest enough in chip design or invested it wrongly.

Sun spend an unbelievable amount of money on dumb ass processor projects.

Towards the end of the 90s all of them realized their business model would not do well against Intel, so pretty much all of them were looking for an exit and IA64 hype basically killed most of them. Sun stuck it out with Sparc with mixed results. IBM POWER continues but in a thin slice of the market.

Ironically there was a section of Digital and Intel who thought that Alpha should be the bases of 64 bit x86. That would have made Intel pretty dominate. Alpha (maybe a TSO version) with 32 bit x86 comparability mode.

[PAPPPmAc]

Look closely at AMD designs (and staff) of the very late 90s and early 2000s and/or all modern x86 parts and see that ...more or less, that's what happened, just not with an Alpha mode.

Dirk Meyer (Co-Architect of the DEC Alpha 21064 and 21264) lead the K7 (Athlon) project, and they run on a licensed EV6 bus borrowed from the Alpha.

Jim Keller (Co-Architect of the DEC Alpha 21164 21264) lead the K8 (first gen x86-64) project, and there are a number of design decisions in the K8 evocative of the later Alpha designs.

The vast majority of x86 parts since the (NexGen Nx686 which became) AMD K6 and Pentium Pro (P6) have been internal RISC-ish cores with decoders that ingest x86 instructions and chunk them up to be scheduled on an internal RISC architecture.

It has turned out to sort of be a better-than-both-worlds thing almost by accident. A major part of what did in the VLIW-ish designs was that "You can't statically schedule dynamic behavior" and a major problem for the RISC designs was that exposing architectural innovations on a RISC requires you change the ISA and/or memory behavior in visible ways from generation to generation, interfering with compatability so... the RISC-behind-x86-decoder designs get to follow the state of the art changing whatever they need to behind the decoder without breaking compatibility AND get to have the decoder do the micro-scheduling dynamically.

[panick21_]

Yes that very much part of the history.

However I disagree that its the best of both worlds.

RISC doesn't necessary require changing the ISA, not anymore then on x86.

[PAPPPmAc]

I'm certainly not going to claim that x86 and its irregularities and extensions of extensions is in _any way_ a good choice for the lingua franca instruction set (or IR in this way of thinking). Its aggressively strictly ordered memory model likely even makes it particularly unsuitable, it just had good inertia and early entrance.

The "RISC of the 80s and 90s" RISC principles were that you exposed your actual hardware features and didn't microcode to keep circuit paths short and simple and let the compiler be clever, so at the time it sort of did imply you couldn't make dramatic changes to your execution model without exposing it to the instruction set. It was about '96 before the RISC designs (PA-RISC2.0 parts, MIPS R10000) started extensively hiding behaviors from the interface so they could go out-of-order.

That changed later, and yeah, modern "RISC" designs are rich instruction sets being picked apart into whatever micro ops are locally convenient by deep out of order dynamic decoders in front of very wide arrays of microop execution units (eg. ARM A77 https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm_holdings/microarchitectures... ), but it took a later change of mindset to get there.

Really, the A64 instruction set is one of the few in wide use that is clearly _designed_ for the paradigm, and that has probably helped with its success (and should continue to, as long as ARM, Inc. doesn't squeeze too hard on the licensing front).

[panick21_]

Seems to me that you just have to be careful when bringing out a new version. You can't change the memory model from chip to chip but that goes for x86 to. Not sure what other behaviors are not really changeable.

Can you give me an example of this? SPARC of the late 90s ran 32bit SPARC.

[Dalewyn]

>That strategic failure by competitors allowed x86 to grow market share at the high end, which benefited Intel more than the money lost on Itanium.

In that sense, Itanium was a resounding success for Intel (and AMD).

[panick21_]

Itanium was a success right until they actually made a chip.

What they should have done is hype Itanium and then they day it came out they should have said yeah this was a joke, what we did is buy Alpha from Compaq and its literally just Alpha with x86 comparability mode.

Then they would have dominated.