GCC 14 dropping IA64 support is final nail in the coffin for Itanic architecture

theregister.com

3 pointslproven3 comments

Itanium was a case study in just how badly Intel could f*ck up - at $10-digit scale, and year after year after year after year after... But their old 32-bit x86 product line was such a cash cow that they got away with it, instead of dying as they richly deserved to.

In hindsight, that was also the era when HP's management obviously transitioned -from being pretty-awesome successors of the founders, to being just more PHB's.

I think Itanium was pretty successful in few important, though entirely non-techincal, ways: it got HPaq to kill and PA-RISC and SGI to stop developing MIPS.

And, most importantly of all, Compaq to give Alpha to Intel, effectively killing it.

Alpha was the strongest rival to all other microprocessors: quicker than Arm, x86, POWER, SPARC, MIPS, everything. So it had to die. :'(

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