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Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

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331 points giuliomagnifico | 8 comments | 25 Sep 25 18:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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bigstrat2003 ◴[25 Sep 25 19:20 UTC] No.45377613[source]▶
I remember at the time thinking it was really silly for Intel to release a 64-bit processor that broke compatibility, and was very glad AMD kept it. Years later I learned about kernel writing, and I now get why Intel tried to break with the old - the compatibility hacks piled up on x86 are truly awful. But ultimately, customers don't care about that, they just want their stuff to run.
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1. zokier ◴[25 Sep 25 19:40 UTC] No.45377925[source]▶
It is worth noting that at the turn of the century x86 wasn't yet so utterly dominant yet. Alphas, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC and whatnot were still very much a thing. So that is part why running x86 software was not as high priority, and maybe even compatibility with PA-RISC would have been a higher priority.
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2. tliltocatl ◴[25 Sep 25 20:58 UTC] No.45378981[source]▶
Well, according to some IA-64 was a planned flop with the whole purpose of undermining HP's supercomputer division.
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3. Spooky23 ◴[25 Sep 25 21:31 UTC] No.45379383[source]▶
The writing was on the wall once Linux was a thing. I did alot of solution design in that period. The only times there were good business cases in my world for not-x86 were scenarios where DBAs and some vertical software required Sun, and occasionally AIX or HPUX for license optimization or some weird mainframe finance scheme.

The cost structure was just bonkers. I replaced a big file server environment that was like $2M of Sun gear with like $600k of HP Proliant.

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4. cogman10 ◴[25 Sep 25 21:37 UTC] No.45379454[source]▶
Nah, HP made bank on their superdome computers even though they had very few clients. People paid through the nose for those. I worked on IA-64 stuff in 2011, long after I thought it was dead :D.

The real thing that killed the division is Oracle announcing that they would no longer support IA-64. It just so happened that like 90% of the clients using Itanium were using it for oracle DBs.

But by that point HP was already trying to get people to transition to more traditional x86 servers that they were selling.

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5. unethical_ban ◴[25 Sep 25 22:00 UTC] No.45379735[source]▶
Is that true in 2000, especially as consumer PCs ramped up?
6. michaelt ◴[25 Sep 25 23:16 UTC] No.45380533[source]▶
And by ~2000 there were also increasingly viable x86 offerings in CAD, 3D and video editing.

You had AutoCAD, you had 3D Studio Max, you had After Effects, you had Adobe Premiere. And it was solid stuff - maybe not best-in-class, but good enough, and the price was right.

7. hawflakes ◴[26 Sep 25 03:45 UTC] No.45382393{3}[source]▶
The hardware folks at HP were big into the outdoors. The story went that it was named Halfdome but customers outside the US who weren't familiar with Yosemite would ask where the other half was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Dome

8. rollcat ◴[26 Sep 25 09:50 UTC] No.45384639[source]▶
> The writing was on the wall once Linux was a thing.

Linux didn't "win" nearly as much as x86 did by becoming "good enough" - Linux just happened to be around to capitalize on that victory.

The writing on the wall was the decreasing prices and increasing capability of consumer-grade hardware. Then real game-changer followed: horizontal scalability.