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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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wvenable ◴[25 Sep 25 21:23 UTC] No.45379301[source]▶
Intel might have been successful with the transition if they didn't decide to go with such radically different and real-world untested architecture for Itanium.
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pixl97 ◴[25 Sep 25 21:37 UTC] No.45379461[source]▶
Well that and Itanium was eyewateringly expensive and standard PC was much cheaper for similar or faster speeds.
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Tsiklon ◴[25 Sep 25 22:48 UTC] No.45380251[source]▶
I think Itanium was a remarkable success in some other ways. Intel utterly destroyed the workstation market with it. HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, Solaris.

Itanium sounded the deathknell for all of them.

The only Unix to survive with any market share is MacOS, (arguably because of its lateness to the party) and it has only relatively recently went back to a more bespoke architecture

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icedchai ◴[25 Sep 25 22:55 UTC] No.45380339[source]▶
I'd argue it was Linux (on x86) and the dot-com crash that destroyed the workstation market, not Itanium. The early 2000s was awash in used workstation gear, especially Sun. I've never seen anyone with an Itanium box.
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1. kjs3 ◴[26 Sep 25 15:37 UTC] No.45387724[source]▶
Yup. I had a front row seat. So many discussion with startups in the 2Ks that boiled down to "we can get a Sun/HP/DEC machine, or we can get 4-5 nice Wintel boxes running Linux for the same price". So at the point where everyone figured out Linux was a 'good enough' Unix for dev work and porting to the incumbents was a reasonable prospect, it was "so do we all want to share one machine or go find 500% more funding just to have the marquis brand". Once you made that leap, "we don't need the incumbents" because inevitable.
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2. icedchai ◴[26 Sep 25 17:00 UTC] No.45388673[source]▶
It was amazing how fast that happened. I remember one startup mainly supported Sun, late 90's, early 2000's. This was for a so called "enterprise" app that would run on-prem. They wanted me to move the app to Linux (Red Hat, I think?) so they could take it to a trade show booth without reliable Internet access. It was a pretty simple port.