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Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

(dfarq.homeip.net)
331 points giuliomagnifico | 3 comments | 25 Sep 25 18:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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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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drewg123 ◴[25 Sep 25 22:48 UTC] No.45380247[source]▶
It didn't help that Itanium was late, slow, and Intel/HP marketing used Itanium to kill off the various RISC CPUs, each of which had very loyal fans. This pissed off a lot of techies at the time.

I was a HUGE DEC Alpha fanboy at the time (even helped port FreeBSD to DEC Alpha), so I hated Itanium with a passion. I'm sure people like me who were 64-bit MIPS and PA-RISC fanboys and fangrirls also existed, and also lobbied against adoption of itanic where they could.

I remember when amd64 appeared, and it just made so much sense.

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EasyMark ◴[25 Sep 25 23:08 UTC] No.45380466[source]▶
This, if intel's compilers and architecture had been stellar and provided a x5 or x10 improvement it would have caught on. However no one in IT was fool enough to switch architectures over a 30-50% performance improvement that require switching hardware, compilers, and software and try to sell it to their bosses.
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1. axiolite ◴[26 Sep 25 01:09 UTC] No.45381389[source]▶
> if intel's compilers and architecture had been stellar and provided a x5 or x10 improvement it would have caught on.

That sounds like DEC Alpha to me, yet Alpha didn't take over the world. "Proprietary architecture" is a bad word, not something you want to base your future on. Without the Intel/AMD competition, x86 wouldn't have dominated for all these years.

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2. cameldrv ◴[26 Sep 25 16:19 UTC] No.45388196[source]▶
The DEC Alpha actually did provide very good performance, and you could even run Windows NT on it. As far as I can tell, the biggest problem was just that Alpha systems were very expensive, and so they had a limited customer base. There were some quirks, but the main thing was just that you'd be paying $2000 for a PC and $10,000 for an Alpha based system, and most people didn't need the performance that badly.
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3. axiolite ◴[27 Sep 25 18:53 UTC] No.45398448[source]▶
> Alpha systems were very expensive, and so they had a limited customer base.

That's the usual chicken & egg problem... If they sold more units, the prices would have come down. But people weren't buying many, because the prices were high.

Itanium, like Alpha, or any other alternative architecture, would also have trouble and get stuck in that circle. x86-64, being a very inexpensive add-on to x86, managed to avoid that.