Itanium is yet another example of how difficult it is to fight software ecosystem momentum.
It had potential but until you have an easy transition path, few will consider it. Apple figured that out during the 68K > PPC > X86 > ARM transitions.
It had potential but until you have an easy transition path, few will consider it. Apple figured that out during the 68K > PPC > X86 > ARM transitions.
PPC was significantly faster than m68k. Intel was significantly faster again. Finally ARM was yet again.
(ARM and Intel especially on laptops)
They could pay the emulation price and still come out equal or usually on top. Even when equal there were often other benefits, like reduced heat.
As I remember hearing Itanium was a dog with x86 code. It never got fast enough to compete let alone supplant it during emulation right?
So it wasn’t (meaningfully?) faster on recompiled code or new code. It wasn’t faster on new code. But it cost way more.
Not a winning combination.
Apple succeeds on their hardware transitions exactly because there isn't a clones market.
Apple is an exception as it has always had a walled-garden ecosystem with the OS, so can force shifts in architectures unlike most companies. The M3/M4 Pro series with unified GPUs is probably the best design on the consumer market right now, but people are not leveraging it as much as they would have in other ecosystems.
Have a wonderful day =3
We don’t know what it would look like if Apple had chosen something that ended up like Itanium. It’s quite possible they don’t have the clout to pull it off.
(Maybe they should have gone Intel instead of PPC, but both were significantly better than m68k at that point)
Apple made a few mistakes, but mostly by trying to compete with doomed hype markets like AR/VR.
Some also ponder what the ecosystem would look like today if the Windows NT kernel had stayed on RISC like initially planned.
The "What if __ ?" universe are fun to imagine, but ultimately less important than the "What now?" universe we live in. =3
I was only talking about CPU transitions.
I only bought that Linux Unleashed book in 1995's Summer, because Windows NT wasn't good enough for doing university assignments at home, which used a mix of DG/UX and Solaris on the campus.
It seems more like they have a high willingness to switch architectures.
Predicting which one is better in the year that you do it or the couple of years after isn't that hard. The question is, where is it going to be in a decade or two?
Each time they picked a huge company you wouldn't have expected to fail in that year, first IBM, then Intel. But that's the problem with huge companies, after a few years on top they tend to get complacent and stagnate.
Now Apple itself is the big company, but it remains to be seen if they're not still going to end up on e.g. RISC-V within the next ten years or so.