Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

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.

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.

Well, according to some IA-64 was a planned flop with the whole purpose of undermining HP's supercomputer division.

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.