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0 pointsAdamN21h ago0 comments

They were trying to compete with Sun and IBM in the server space (SPARC and Power) and thought that they needed a totally pro architecture (which Itanium was). The baggage of 32-bit x86 would have just slowed it all down. However having an x86-64 would have confused customers in the middle.

Think back then it was all about massive databases - that was where the big money was and x86 wasn't really setup for the top end load patterns of databases (or OLAP data lakes).

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NetMageSCW18h ago

Steve Jobs quote seems appropriate and yet still hard for companies to learn: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will"

twoodfin15h ago

In the end, Intel did cannibalize themselves. It wasn’t too long after the Itanium launch that Intel was publicly presenting a roadmap that had Xeons as the appealing mass-market server product.

hulitu1h ago

> and thought that they needed a totally pro architecture (which Itanium was).

Was it though ? They made a new CPU from scratch, promissing to replace Alpha, PA-RISC and MIPS, but the first release was a flop.

The only "win" of Itanium that I see, is that it eliminated some competitors in low and medium end server market: MIPS and PA-RISC, with SPARC being on life support.

AdamNOPnew1m ago

I never used them but my understanding is that the performance was solid - but in a market with incumbents you don't just need to be as good as them you need to be significantly better or significantly cheaper. My sense was that it met expectations but that it wasn't enough for people to switch over.

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