| I that understand that context. But even so. POWER and SPARC were continue to be developed. And its hard to argue that either of them should have given up on their architecture. POWER is still developed. It probably made sense for Sun to stop working on SPARC eventually but not when Itanium was announced. Sun problem was just that they spend quite a bit of money, they were just never actually very good at designing processors. SGI was the most aggressive on telling everybody that Itanium would be the future. And they paid for that. They massively delayed MIPS upgrades (only to then start it again once they realized it would take a while for Itanium to come to the market). For a while after this they still made their money on MIPS and all their attempts to push Itanium pretty much fell flat. So arguable it was smart for them to plan to eventually dump MIPS but now how and when they tried to do it (Also I don't disagree that MIPS was a deadend). The deal HP got would have been fantastic if Intel had adopted PA-RISC 64-bit instead of Itanium. Given what happened HP wasn't really competitive with Sun 64-bit SMP servers and Sun made a killing on those things before the bubble. Once they bought Compaq and for a while were selling SMP servers based on Alpha. HP really should have continued to push Alpha after the bought Compaq. The already had VMS ported to Alpha and a large captured base willing to pay a little extra. They aggressively ported VMS to Itanium and thanks to the insane deal they made Intel had to manufacture them processors for a decade+. They are a large enough company and Alpha next few version had the chance to be really great, with things advanced vector extension and they had basically had the best processor team in the world. So yes, it was correct that all these companies wanted to drop their development cost, but doing so before you know really about Itanium and how good it was, that's questionable and messed up all the strategies. There was just an assumption that Itanium was gone be amazing. Granted, VLIW processors were all the hype. Sun also waste a bunch of money on VLIW processor technology in the 90s and unlike HP, they didn't it on Intel. Gordan Bell tried to hook up Alpha with Intel and make Alpha the 64-bit architecture that Intel went with. That would have been quite a different history. But for various reasons this didn't happen, and instead Intel went with HP and their next generation VLIW idea. P.S: It would have been pretty smart of Sun went in on Alpha in 1992, then they could have saved on development threw out the 90s. DEC had built up a huge fabs to handle Alpha but almost nobody bought it. They were really looking for a high value costumer and couldn't find one. Edit:
> (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.) Well it wasn't unfortunate for everybody. Sun made quite a bit of money for a few more years with SPARC. And so did IBM with Power. I think those two companies were happy with the Itanium failure. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo