Such a shame. It could have made much more of an impact if released with better Linux support back then...
Itanium had Linux support from day one:
> The Trillian Project was an effort by an industry consortium to port the Linux kernel to the Itanium processor. The project started in May 1999 with the goal of releasing the distribution in time for the initial release of Itanium, then scheduled for early 2000.[183] By the end of 1999, the project included Caldera Systems, CERN, Cygnus Solutions, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, SGI, SuSE, TurboLinux and VA Linux Systems.[184] The project released the resulting code in February 2000.[183] The code then became part of the mainline Linux kernel more than a year before the release of the first Itanium processor.
... for values of "day one" which are prior to the release of the actual hardware.
> The Trillian project was able to do this for two reasons:
> the free and open source GCC compiler had already been enhanced to support the Itanium architecture.
> a free and open source simulator had been developed to simulate an Itanium processor on an existing computer.[185]
Itanium was The Future for a good while. It got plenty of resources, hardware, software, and marketing. By the late 1990s, people knew that full support in FOSS was required, so they made it happen. Itanium died because it was founded on a fundamental idea (making parallelism explicit and relying on software to extract it using static analysis) that simply didn't pan out, and when AMD brought the x86 ISA into the 64-bit world it was done.
Perhaps another example of “worse is better”…
When the Pentium 4 adopted AMD's instruction set after Microsoft's refusal to support a new Intel 64-bit ISA, the customer base evaporated.
Back then, having Microsoft’s blessing could make or break an ISA. I can’t shake the feeling Itanium was being sold to the wrong crowd.
Well, with the arguable exception of Alpha. The 21264 presaged the modern core most closely, even if it was too big and expensive to be very competitive on desktops. The, er, "21364" reached market a few years later and took over the world as the Pentium Pro.
What if Intel had said to HP "That's a really dumb plan" when it brought up the idea of EPIC? I agree probably not much. Intel would presumably have accelerated what Gelsinger called a 64-bit RAS Xeon in a magazine article. Probably good for Intel and not clearly negative for HP. (Both companies went that route in the end anyway.)
Less money would have been wasted in general but it's not like a company spending $100s of millions on Itanium would have told its engineers and other employees to go fiddle with some other exotic architecture. It probably just wouldn't have hired them in the first place.
Again, if no one (including giants like Apple and NVIDIA) has invented new ways to run code in the last 30 years either, it seems like wishful thinking to argue that Intel would have somehow done it had they been less wrong about VLIW.
You're probably right. If Intel had said (internally): "Screw it. Let's just extend x86. It's not like we have anything to fear from AMD." You'd probably have had it a bit earlier. (Though it's not like most buyers of x86-based systems were screaming for 64-bit until into the 2000s anyway so it's not clear that there would have been a big push to pull the timeframes in by much.)
And Intel would probably have still pushed too hard on frequency and ILP--because Microsoft if a senior Intel I exec I knew who isn't prone to lying is to be believed.
Also, yeah. Apple Silicon is great but it's not new paradigm great. If anything, the revolution has been in heterogeneous computing (esp. GPUs to date). And a lot of that has been partly enabled by open source.
Not sure I'd say the 21364 was PPro since as pointed out it came before 21264. There's clearly some crossbreeding tho. The Alpha bus interface did live on in Athlon, tho.
Transmeta did slightly better as CMS (the "JIT") could take advantage of biases discovered at runtime, but still couldn't do as well as a fully dynamic scheduler.
Their complaints about that system really focused on the administration and provisioning issues. It ran code fine.