Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I keep wishing that on an alternative reality AMD would have lost access to x86 IP, thus never coming up with x64 as cheap alternative to Itanium.

View on HN

I'm pretty sure in that alternative reality, you would be paying today top dollar for a quad-core. Today.

I doubt that mass production of Itaniums would be kept the prices that high.

Having a monopoly on the production of them would have. Example: Intel HEDT pricing before and after AMD Ryzen Threadripper release.

Intel already had a kind of monopoly and the prices were going down.

In Portugal there were only PCs with Intel CPUs around, the Cyrix, NEC and other clones were hardly anywhere to find until the first Athlons came to be.

I think x64 WAS Itanium. x86-64 is the beast we are dealing with today. In that world maybe everyone goes to PowerPc? The move from 32bit G4 to 64bit G5 cpu wasn't a big deal since the PPC had 64bit variations back in 1997 with the 620 (though apple never used it)

Everyone would go where Windows would go, as far as I remember PowerPC Windows NT did not got much love.

Yeah, that was kind of tongue-in-cheek. Apple knows when to leave a cpu architecture. They've done it 3 times already (M68k->PPC->x86->ARM)

Though I think we're getting now to the point that we would have gotten to then. AMD bought x86 another 15 years of life.

Itanium was IA-64.

you're right. I guess X64 and X86-64 are synonyms, more or less?

Yes, x64, X86-64 and amd64 refer basically to the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com