Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

I'll give a viewpoint that the article reads like a listing of spec sheets and process improvements for CPUs of that era and not much else. Not really worth reading imho.

I'd love some discussion on why Intel left XScale and went to Atom and i think Itanium is worthy of discussion in this era too. I don't really want a raw listing of [In year X Intel launched Y with SPEC_SHEET_LISTING features].

View on HN

>Itanium

IMO, Intel took us from common, affordable CPUs to high-priced, "Intel-only" CPUs. It was originally designed to use Rambus RAM, and it turned out Intel had a stake in that company. Intel got greedy and tried to force the market to go the way it wanted.

Honestly, AMD saved the x86 market for us common folks. Their approach of extending x86 to 64-bit and adopting DDR RAM allowed for the continuation of affordable, mainstream CPUs. This enabled companies to buy tons of servers for cheap.

Intel’s u-turn on x86-64 shows even they knew they couldn’t win.

AMD has saved Intel’s x86 platform more than once. The market wants a common, gradual upgrade path for the PC platform not a sudden, expensive, single-vendor ecosystem.

Itanium didn't support RDRAM until Itanium 2.

Intel selling XScale to Marvell in 2006 was their pivotal strategic error - they abandoned a viable ARM-based solution right before the smartphone explosion, betting everything on x86 compatibility. Atom's power inefficiency compared to ARM designs then left them completely unprepared for the mobile revolution, costing them the entire smartphone/tablet market.

Actually atom was very efficient, but they tended to pair it with a horribly inefficient southbridge that would idle at many times the full CPU power draw (2-3W or more)

I had an Atom 330 server, worked really well. It came with came with one little very noisy fan ... on the chipset. The CPU just had a small heatsink. It was okay for my server use case, but the entire situation was pretty silly.

It seems clear Intel was either intentionally trying to hamstring this market or at least trying to make up margin by bundling it with an obsolete process chipset.

> I'd love some discussion on why Intel left XScale and went to Atom

I thought it was pretty obvious. They didn't control the ARM ISA and ARM Ltd designs had caught up to + surpassed XScale innovations (superscalar, Out-of-order pipelining, MIPS/w, etc). So instead of further innovating they decided to launch a competitor of their own ISA.

Intel at the time was clear about it: they wanted to concentrate fully on x86. They thought they could do everything with x86; hadn’t they already won against their RISC competitors by pushing billions into x86? Why would ARM be any different? Shortsighted, in hindsight, but you can see how they got there.

> i think Itanium is worthy of discussion in this era too

Itanium was a massive technical failure but a massiver business success.

Intel spent a gigabuck and drove every single non-x86 competitor out of the server business with the exception of IBM.

I remember the plethora of Unix workstations and servers in the 90's: Sun, HP, SGI, DEC, IBM. I'm skeptical Itanium killed them. It was software: plain old x86 and Linux killed them.

In addition, Apple probably took some of the Unix workstation market. In the 90s everyone was using SGI for graphics stuff, but ten years later that had shifted quite a bit to Apple and OS X.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com