[ColdStream]

Itanium is yet another example of how difficult it is to fight software ecosystem momentum.

It had potential but until you have an easy transition path, few will consider it. Apple figured that out during the 68K > PPC > X86 > ARM transitions.

[wmf]

Itanium 1 had hardware x86 compatibility and Itanium 2 had software x86 emulation just like Apple. It wasn't enough.

[MBCook]

Right.

PPC was significantly faster than m68k. Intel was significantly faster again. Finally ARM was yet again.

(ARM and Intel especially on laptops)

They could pay the emulation price and still come out equal or usually on top. Even when equal there were often other benefits, like reduced heat.

As I remember hearing Itanium was a dog with x86 code. It never got fast enough to compete let alone supplant it during emulation right?

So it wasn’t (meaningfully?) faster on recompiled code or new code. It wasn’t faster on new code. But it cost way more.

Not a winning combination.

[wmf]

IIRC Itanium was faster on natively compiled HPC code, presumably because it had more FPUs and larger cache than the Pentium 4. But in general it probably wasn't a good upgrade and Intel would have had to sandbag x86 a lot to force Itanium adoption.

[AnthonyMouse]

The other problem was that the Pentium 4 itself was kind of a dog, and then the Pentium M and Core lines started making that look bad, by which point the Itanic passengers could feel their socks getting wet and a growing concern about there not being enough life boats.

[pjmlp]

Only because AMD exists it wasn't enough. Had Intel been free to decide where x86 goes, the Itanium story would be much different.

Apple succeeds on their hardware transitions exactly because there isn't a clones market.

[Joel_Mckay]

Agreed, everyone has a pet architecture that fascinates them, but if its so good only 5 people can code for the target... it is e-waste within a year.

Apple is an exception as it has always had a walled-garden ecosystem with the OS, so can force shifts in architectures unlike most companies. The M3/M4 Pro series with unified GPUs is probably the best design on the consumer market right now, but people are not leveraging it as much as they would have in other ecosystems.

Have a wonderful day =3

[pjmlp]

Apple is the survivor of another era, people keep forgetting that x86 clones are the exception of how computer market used to be, not the other way around.

[MBCook]

The walled garden is an advantage of some sort, but they’ve also never made a bad call on switching architectures.

We don’t know what it would look like if Apple had chosen something that ended up like Itanium. It’s quite possible they don’t have the clout to pull it off.

(Maybe they should have gone Intel instead of PPC, but both were significantly better than m68k at that point)

[AnthonyMouse]

> they’ve also never made a bad call on switching architectures.

It seems more like they have a high willingness to switch architectures.

Predicting which one is better in the year that you do it or the couple of years after isn't that hard. The question is, where is it going to be in a decade or two?

Each time they picked a huge company you wouldn't have expected to fail in that year, first IBM, then Intel. But that's the problem with huge companies, after a few years on top they tend to get complacent and stagnate.

Now Apple itself is the big company, but it remains to be seen if they're not still going to end up on e.g. RISC-V within the next ten years or so.

[Joel_Mckay]

>We don’t know what it would look like if Apple had chosen something that ended up like Itanium

Apple made a few mistakes, but mostly by trying to compete with doomed hype markets like AR/VR.

Some also ponder what the ecosystem would look like today if the Windows NT kernel had stayed on RISC like initially planned.

The "What if __ ?" universe are fun to imagine, but ultimately less important than the "What now?" universe we live in. =3

[pjmlp]

I would already be happy if Windows NT had been more serious about UNIX compatibility.

I only bought that Linux Unleashed book in 1995's Summer, because Windows NT wasn't good enough for doing university assignments at home, which used a mix of DG/UX and Solaris on the campus.

[MBCook]

Oh sure, Apple has TONS of mistakes if we look overall.

I was only talking about CPU transitions.