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Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

(dfarq.homeip.net)
331 points giuliomagnifico | 2 comments | 25 Sep 25 18:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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kjs3 ◴[26 Sep 25 02:00 UTC] No.45381749[source]▶
PA-RISC fanboys and fangrirls

Itanic wasn't exactly HP-PA v.3, but it was a kissing cousin. Most of the HP shops I worked with believed the rhetoric it was going to be a straightforward if not completely painless upgrade from the PA-8x00 gear they were currently using.

Not so much.

The MIPS 10k line on the other hand...sigh...what might have been.

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

And you were right.

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1. hawflakes ◴[26 Sep 25 03:43 UTC] No.45382385[source]▶
Did the PA-RISC shops run their old PA-RISC code with the Aries emulator?

One of the selling points for HP users was running old code via dynamic translation and x86 would just work on the hardware directly.

Another fun fact I remember from working at HP was that later PA-RISC chips were fabbed at Intel because the HP-Intel agreement had Intel fabbing a certain amount of chips and since Merced was running behind... Intel-fabbed PA-RISC chips!

https://community.hpe.com/t5/operating-system-hp-ux/parisc-p...

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2. kjs3 ◴[30 Sep 25 14:27 UTC] No.45425900[source]▶
I didn't personally know of anyone using Aries in anger (production), but it looked like a neat trick.