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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

> All oversights and mistakes made by Intel over the years

Engineering is not about achieving perfection. It's about organizing compromises to create a product that provides good utility at a fair price. These were not oversights or mistakes they were intentional design decisions.

Likewise.. you can see segmented memory as "nonsense" and a "waste of development time" but Intel clearly didn't fail at anything. They've been one of the largest and most successful chip manufacturers for decades, because their products provided real utility at affordable consumer prices and software developers gladly put up with the technological choices to be a part of that giant market.

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> They've been one of the largest and most successful chip manufacturers for decades

Probably the 2 biggest reasons for this are that only 2 companies are allowed to "touch" x86, and that the second company was easily undermined by nefarious business practices. This resulted in a lot of things that were not "oversights or mistakes" but rather for the longest time lax approaches under a distinct lack of pressure.

It's hard to say how the x86 world would have looked like today if someone like Nvidia had a license.

> It's hard to say how the x86 world would have looked like today if someone like Nvidia had a license.

There's some alternate universe out there where x86 died because Nvidia was charging $1200 for a mid tier CPU so arm was able to creep up even faster :/.

>They've been one of the largest and most successful chip manufacturers for decades, because their products provided real utility at affordable consumer prices...

Do not forget all of the anti-competitive AMD nonsense over the years. Sabotaging AMD performance on benchmarking is my stand-out, but there were also the payouts to Dell and others to purchase exclusively Intel chips.

The IRQ remapping / A20 / segmented memory happened years before the AMD benchmarking / Dell payouts / etc.

Not to mention sabotaging AMD performance for all programs compiled with the Intel C Compiler

Market capture via corner cutting excuses lazy engineering by evil bloated monopolist. Got it.

(I'm still shocked how they've begun losing to AMD. Having all of the money, dirty benchmarking tricks, and "let's just hire all of the people" haven't worked out, incredibly.)

anyone in the business side knows that Intel has succeeded splendidly, at insider Defense deals, proprietary components and market manipulation to crush rivals. Engineering is always on display, but does not tell the full financial story of Intel "greed is good" Corp.

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