Hacker News Reader

Comment by whatisyour | Hacker News Reader

Itanium failed because of VLIW instruction set, not because of any other reason.

Without alternatives, Windows and UNIX partners would have pushed it no matter what.

If x86 compatibility would have been left behind anyway it would have opened up Windows to Intel competitors (I remember that PA-RISC was pretty hot at the time, and Alpha was also still quite revelant, although that was in the years right before the Itanium). AMD essentially saved Intel from becoming the new IBM.

HP was also moving into Itanium.

To the massive disappointment of the last Amiga die hards ;)

Maybe. Who knows. Maybe PAE could have been stretched further

Or maybe, just maybe one of those other vendors would have gotten their head out of the sand and made a 64bit processor that ran windows. But I think Wintel was set too deep to anyone challenge that

I disagree. There was ARM which would have taken over the mantle. And given the recent wins of M1 just due to abilty to decode instructions better, x86 would have died much earlier.

At that time (early 2000s) there wasn’t a high-performance ARM design. There had been StrongARM in the late 1990s, but it was sold by DEC to Intel, who killed it off. The designers moved to AMD to work on amd64.

In addition to Alpha, PowerPC was shipping in volume, reasonably competitive with a high-end option, and Windows NT had already shipped support for it along with MIPS.

The selling point for Itanium was compatibility but when they failed so badly at that it leveled out the field since you were going to have to recompile anyway.

Outside Apple and IBM, no else cared for PowerPC in any significant size for desktop users.

Windows NT originally shipped with support for all major CPUs targeted by UNIX workstations, yet all of them faded away until Itanium.

Yes, but that was largely due to Itanium’s initial optimism. My argument would be that had Intel’s x86 line also faltered, you’d have seen a lot more interest in those alternatives which had much better price/performance and also simply things like a suitable range of parts (not many people want to listen to a huge power supply on their desk). I don’t think there’s any path where people would have plunged ahead with VLIW without a radically better compiler scene.

> Windows NT originally shipped with support for all major CPUs targeted by UNIX workstations, yet all of them faded away until Itanium.

Sure, and as any Linux advocate will tell you, most folks on Windows are stuck there due to the proprietary applications that only run there. They don't care much about the OS, but they need the apps that they know and which have their data locked away.

These apps didn't run on the other processors, so Windows on other arches was mainly a curiosity.

Actually they did on Alpha, and Microsoft has just recently did the same for ARM. They would have done the same for Itanium if AMD64 had not happened.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...

And because Itanium's performance was worse or at least not much better than their x86 parts.

And price

Reply on news.ycombinator.com