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Comment by xorcist | Hacker News Reader

Itanium can be regarded as a huge success. Maybe some don't remember, but the minicomputers and unices were where all the money was. Sure, Intel had the process edge, and had completely cornered the microcomputer market. But PCs had slim margins and didn't really matter in the bigger scope important data processing.

Many of the computer nerds watched in awe as vendor after vendor dropped their hugely expensive and engineering heavy custom CPU architectures and lined up behind Intel. IBM was the only big player who didn't swallow the bait. "Even if they fail, that's a huge success" was a common observation at the time.

And sure enough. I don't think they failed on purpose, but business wise it was a win-win situation. The x86 architecture would have won anyway, because of the sheer scale, but the Itanium wreckage hastened it. Everyone needed to move, so why not move to x86/Linux directly?

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Comment I saw on YouTube a while back:

> In some ways Itanium was the most successful bluff every played in the tech industry. In much the same way that Reagan's Star Wars bankrupted the Soviet Union got almost every single competitor to fold. Back at the beginning of the project, Intel was nowhere in high-end & 64-bit computing. There was HP (PA- RISC), Sun (Sparc), Dec (Alpha), IBM (Power), MIPS (SGI). Intel wisely picked the partner with the stupidest management (Carly) to give up their competitive edge and announce to analysts that Intel's vision/roadmap is so awesome that RISC is dead and that they're going to follow the bidding of their master Intel for their 64-bit plan. Wall Street bought in to the story so much that almost everyone else with competitive chips folded their strong hands to Itanium's bluff - SGI spun off MIPS and MIPS decided to leave the high-end space. Compaq undervalued Alpha and let it die. Sun tried to become a software company and if it weren't for Fujitsu making modern sparcs, sparc would be dead.

> Basically, with nothing but PR and Carly's stupidity, Intel wiped out over half of the high-end computing processor market.

> Thankfully AMD had the vision to see through the bluff, and saw the opportunity for 64-bit computing that worked; and thankfully IBM didn't have someone like Carly around so they saw the value in retaining competitive advantages; or the computing world would be pretty bleak place right now..

The comparison to star wars is certainly apt. It doesn't need to work, in the engineering sense, to be useful. Sometimes economics can trump engineering.

An important part of the PR machinery was that by picking up a hot topic from academia, they really got absolutely everyone to talk about VLIW as the next genreration RISC. And everyone already knew that RISC was superior and x86 was a toy, but which also was mostly true at time.

In the end, what won was huge caches and huge OoO pipelines. Linus Torvalds had some strong opinions and well known opinions on this, which turned out to be mostly right.

For anyone who doesn't know but is curious, "Carly" refers to Hewlett Packard (HP) CEO Carly Fiorina. Fiorina oversaw HP's acquisition of Compaq, which had previously acquired DEC, IIRC. Reportedly, the HP-Compaq acquisition was opposed by many, including board members and family. (This was before my time, but I read a lot of trade rags as a kid, and then later occasionally heard insider stories.)

HP was legendary for culture, like "management by walking around, and talking to the people on the ground", which was different from Fiorina's style.

Compaq was the most noteworthy IBM-compatible PC company, before Dell's dorm room dirt-cheap generic PC clones business skyrocketed into an empire.

DEC was the maker of the PDPs and VAX-based minicomputers on which much of the field of Computer Science was arguably developed, and later MIPS- and then Alpha-based workstations and servers, while also still developing VAXen (the plural form of the word).

All those proprietary CPU ISAs listed (PA-RISC, SPARC, Alpha, POWER), when they were introduced on engineering/graphics workstation computers, were especially exciting, because -- separate from the technical architecture itself -- they would briefly probably be the fastest workstation in your shop. All of these made MS-DOS/Windows PCs and Macs look like toys by comparison (though, eventually, Windows NT 3.51 started to be semi-credible if you just needed to run a single big-ticket application program). And you didn't know what exciting new development would be next.

Maybe it was like if, today, several makers of top-end gaming GPUs resulted in a leapfrogging on a cadence of every few/several months. And if they had different strengths, and, incidentally, curious exclusive game software to explore. Or like the very recent succession of Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, etc., and wondering what the next big wow will be, what they've done with it, and what you can do with it.

When I knew some Linux developers working on Itanium, some were already calling it "Itanic". (I didn't read much into the name at the time, because were a lot of joke derogatory names for brands and technologies.) Later, I thought "Itanic" was because it was a huge expensive thing that was doomed to sink. The theory in the TFA sounds like most competing ship companies gave up on their own engine designs when they heard how great the Titanic would be.

I used to lust after the Alpha a friend of mine had. The raw compute performance increase from year to year was amazing during those times.

A grad school officemate had previously worked at Thinking Machines, so was familiar with exotic supercomputers, but I think all the compute for his dissertation ran on a blue Alphastation or Alphaserver "footrest" under his desk.

The whole thing is weird. The Itanium is as much an HP project as it is an Intel one. While HP and Intel are busy creating the IA64, Compaq is licensing the EV6 bus to AMD, for use in the Athlon. If the Athlon hadn't been a success, I don't believe that AMD would have had the funds to develop the first AMD64 processors.

Then a few years later, Compaq is bought by HP, which does nothing with the remaining DEC/Alpha IP, the same tech that helped AMD build the Athlons.

> Compaq is licensing the EV6 bus to AMD, for use in the Athlon.

AMD was also hiring away many Alpha developers IIRC.

It’s pretty weird to frame it as “Carly’s stupidity” when all of HP’s competitors mentioned ended up worse. Smacks of misogyny to be honest.

Do you know anything about HP's failure under her rule? I don't care about her gender, but I do know for a fact that they lost market share and had a massive brain drain under her tenure. Her massive layoffs included axing their R&D. Why don't you read this before jumping to conclusions?[1] It identifies many of the issues I saw first hand during that period, while still trying its best to find reasons to praise her.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/04/20/analysts-carly-fiorin...

The comment to which I was replying claimed that “Carly’s stupidity wiped out the high-end processor market.”

Whatever her other faults as a CEO, that’s just not what happened with the Itanium. The writing was already on the wall for high-end Unix in the mid-1990s.

HP teamed up with Intel and had them take over the bulk of R&D expense with HP continuing to extract profits from the shrinking market for over a decade. Meanwhile the competitors DEC and SGI and Sun basically went out of business. (IBM of course retained its niche as the only choice for those who only buy IBM.)

This would have been a more appropriate comment, than calling someone misogynistic.

A misogynistic tone is recurrent in online comments about Carly Fiorina’s time at HP, and in my opinion the comment blaming her stupidity for Itanium was in that vein.

Nobody talks about Sun’s contemporary leadership using phrases like “that dumb hockey jock Scott ruined Sparc.” Somehow it’s ok when the CEO was a woman.

These two things are not the same.

You don’t hang around with enough ex-Sun people if you haven’t heard derogatory comments about McNealy. But his ultimate failure at Sun wasn’t the same scale, and Sun was never as well managed or universally revered as HP.

I guess I hang around with different ex-Sun people because, however Sun ended up eventually, they're all pretty praising of McNealy and Sun's culture.

One thing McNealy did get right is that Sun was pretty much the only one of the large Unix vendors that wasn't at least preparing for the possibility of an all-Microsoft future with NT. (IBM was arguably placing more of a small side bet that execs like Mills didn't really believe in but almost no one besides Sun dismissed NT out of hand.

Yet Solaris is gone for all practical purposes, while Aix is still seeing new sales beyond plain maintenance, with increase in 2022.

I know that she was blamed for that considerably more than her male predecessors who set them on that trajectory. She definitely isn’t blameless but I would pause to question why so many men are so quick to shift the blame to the only woman available as a scapegoat.

I have an acquaintance who has been at HP for ages and his characterization is more that she was left holding the bag.

I remember an internal email thread about HP and Fiorina at the analyst firm I used to work at and, at one point, one of my colleagues wrote with exasperation "What would you have them do? Bring back Lou Platt?"

Hurd did seem to right the ship when he took over. But, to the degree many of us didn't really recognize at the time, a lot of that was financial engineering and eating of seed corn.

Talk to the HP engineering staff who were there. It was irreparable, and it was Fiorina who did it. Or so they generally claim.

HP could have killed the PC market with Alpha, spending all that Itanic development money on transitioning PCs from x86 to Alpha via an emulator, and then promoting native software. Apple have pulled this trick three times now, with great success.

Instead Intel/HP nuked the entire mid/high-end of the industry including their own project and set computing back by a decade or so.

She was also a notoriously terrible CEO for other reasons. And then tried to jump-start a political career with one of the worst campaign videos ever made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKWlOxhSIKk

I would be curious to read what people at DEC/Compaq/HP thought at the time about this because presumably people on the Alpha team would have thought of this idea. IIRC the Alpha could run x86 (with automatic translation) faster than the latest Intel chips[1] but then Intel got sufficiently good at the whole out-of-order thing (and I guess at the process of making chips in general) that they took the lead. Maybe there are good reasons that the people working on the Alpha thought they couldn’t win?

I’m particularly interested in the Alpha because it seems like the thing was designed with many of today’s CPU performance challenges in mind. E.g. simple stuff like 64-bit but also things like caches and multiprocessing (cf the very weak concurrent memory model). See also [2]

[1] eg see this from ’97 claiming that 0.5GHz Alpha could run x86 at comparable speed to a 2GHz PII https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... but I’ve also seen claims that the Pentium Pro of ’95 would have been faster than this

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/151220.151226 and I think the same here: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art1.p...

Re: Alpha team - as a side note, two ex-Alpha engineers played a pretty pivotal role in the processor landscape we have today:

Dan Dobberpuhl - founded PA Semi, acquired by Apple in 2008 and kicked off Apple's custom processor strategy.

Jim Keller - arguably the most famous processor architect alive today (Athlon 64, AMD Zen, Apple A4/5).

Alpha was six feet under by the time HP acquired Compaq which had acquired DEC.

Computing was in no way set back by a decade. The alternative to Itanium was, as Gelsinger has said publicly, an enhanced x86 Xeon--which is what Intel ended up doing (and which HP subsequently adopted to run HP-UX and it's other enterprise OSs).

Obviously ARM has won out over x86 on mobile and--in a limited way--on the desktop. ARM's footprint will probably increase. We'll see. Then there's RISC-V. But that's all basically RISC.

Indeed it is thinly veiled misogyny, Fiorina joined HP just around Itanium's missed release date. I don't consider her a great leader, but there is no need to blame her for every failure of HP, the Itanium was conceived and almost completed by her predecessors.

Wrongly assigning blame happens every day regardless of gender. While I'm sure there are many cases where it's done out of a misogynistic mindset, accusing someone of misogyny based on nothing more than the circumstance she is a woman and was wrongly assigned blame just rubs me the wrong way.

The HP-Intel joint effort to develop what became the Itanium was announced 5 years Fiorina became the CEO of HP. During that time she was working at AT&T/Lucent and had zero input in HP's strategy.

*5 years before

Typed it on a phone and noticed the error only after the edit timer expired.

It was a humiliating failure, not a success. The trend against those other architectures was already clear: as processor complexity went up, the costs of building them skyrocketed and most of those companies had no plan for the kind of volume you’d need to support them. Don’t forget that applied on both the hardware and software sides: a competitive compiler and optimized libraries were important.

This is why Itanium got traction: everyone knew that you needed volume to stay in the game. IBM had a strategy to get that with Apple & Motorola (PowerPC started in 1991), but HP did not have anything like that for PA-RISC. DEC might have gotten there if they’d had a more aggressive partner for the lower-end Alpha strategy but the merger killed any chance of that.

Since x86 was rising so fast, it might not be clear why Intel got involved. That goes back to the licensing rights: they couldn’t prevent companies like AMD from competing directly with them. Itanium was the attempt to close off that line of competition legally and they were willing to attack their own product margins to do it.

I never got anyone from Intel to actually admit to the licensing angle but it was pretty widely speculated about at the time.

Good point. I don’t have any inside information but it was certainly common to characterize it as a long reaction to things like losing that 386 lawsuit.

Yeah. Whether or not everyone was smart enough to never actually write down such a thing in an email or memo, you know there were execs who were keenly aware of this and, even if not the deciding factor, presumably helped influence the decision.

Doesn't quite add up. SGI folded their CPUs (thanks Mr Belluzzo) before Itanium was even released, Sun offered their x86 server about the same time (and kept their SPARCs).

HP was the only casualty to Itanium, but that was self-inflicted.

To be completely honest, MIPS CPU's had never been known for their speed – not until the release of the 64-bit MIPS architecture anyway when they finally became competitive with other RISC CPU's, but it was a complete ISA redesign.

Sun was in a somewhat similar boat with the SPARC v8 architecture, and they were rather late with UltraSPARC (SPARC v9 ISA). Yet, they managed to hold out longer due to having a switched memory controller and a very wide memory bus, which allowed them to become the best hardware appliance to run the Oracle database (despite being less performant), and divert the cash flow into the UltraSPARC development. UltraSPARC I was underwhelming, and with UltraSPARC II they finally caught up with other RISC vendors and gradually started outperforming some (e.g. MIPS) in some areas.

Amusingly, the 512-bit wide memory bus has made a comeback in Apple M1 Max laptops (laptops!), and M1 Ultra has a 1024-bit wide memory bus.

Why HP went all in with ditching their own perfectly fine PA-RISC 2.0 architecture is an enigma to me tho.

> Why HP went all in with ditching their own perfectly fine PA-RISC 2.0 architecture

Again, thanks Rick Belluzzo.

> To be completely honest, MIPS CPU's had never been known for their speed

SPEC would like to dissagree with you.

He has MIPS as not known for their speed and SPARC getting ahead as a major achievement in the same post.

That is a very frivolous interpretation of what I said.

I was comparing: a) 32-bit MIPS CPU's with 64-bit MIPS CPU's, b) 32-bit SPARC v8 and 64-bit SPARC v9 (UltraSPARC) CPU's, and c) performance of 32-bit RISC CPU's comparatively to each other. 32-bit MIPS and SPARC v8 CPU's were slow, with MIPS32 being one of the slowest across the entire board.

I was not comparing MIPS64 to UltraSPARC II or III because MIPS64 implementations (especially R10k and R12k) were exceptionally highly performant, especially in numeric computations that UltraSPARC CPU's were not known for at the time. UltraSPARC II/III systems were renowned for very high, sustained overall system throughput, and nor for high CPU computational performance.

At the time, if one wanted a number crunching beast, they had a choice of either MIPS64, or PA-RISC 2.0, or POWER CPU's. Mostly either MIPS64 or PA-RISC 2.0 (I am not including DEC Alpha – another early performance contender – because it perished too prematurely in the acrid belly of Compaq/HP acquisition shenanigans and did not get a chance to advance past 21264).

To be crystal clear: my statement pertained to 32-bit MIPS CPU's and MIPS CPU's predating the R8000. They were very slow. 32-bit MIPS CPU's did not have multiply and division instructions, they had branch delay slots that are unwieldy for a compiler to generate the efficient code for, plus other stuff. Early 32-bit MIPS implementations did not even have a hardware TLB (it was implemented in the kernel), which made the context switching between kernel and user spaces slow.

R8000 (MIPS IV) was fast and later MIPS64 CPU's were very fast, especially on floating point operations, and consistently outperformed competing 64-bit RISC and x86 CPU's because the MIPS64 was an ISA redesign that addressed and fixed many of the problems of the 32-bit version of the ISA.

Yes, but the CPU pipeline is years long. So years before Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, PA-Risc and related CPUs had to decide if the R&D for a next generation CPU made sense in the face of the announced Itanium which most believes was going to dominate the server industry.

When the Itanium shipped years late and slower than expected it was too late for any of the competition (except Power) to recover. Granted the x86-64s were ramping up and they would have all had tough competition, even without Itanium.

> ...can be regarded as a huge success...

So long as one puts big, fat "giga-money-losing" and "humiliating" disclaimers on "success", then yes.

Vs. - what if, instead of Itanium, Intel had more-quietly designed and delivered good, high-performance x86-64 CPU's? I'm thinking that, by bottom-line metrics, would have been a vastly more successful business strategy.

Well, that's what AMD was doing. Intel's pride couldn't let them legitimize that strategy.

Meanwhile, ARM was designing little low-power RISC toys that were obviously no danger to Intel at all.

Itanium was announced (and supposed to have shipped!) well before AMD announced x86-64

THIS. Per Wikipedia:

"AMD originally announced AMD64 in 1999[14] with a full specification available in August 2000"

vs.

"In June 1994 Intel and HP announced their joint effort to make a new ISA..."

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