A Brief History of Chip Hype and Flops

On CNet.com, Brooke Crowthers has a review of some flops in the chip-making world — from IBM, Intel, and AMD — and the hype that surrounded them, which is arguably as interesting as the chips' failures. "First, I have to revisit Intel's Itanium. Simply because it's still around and still missing production target dates. The hype: 'This design philosophy will one day replace RISC and CISC. It is a gateway into the 64-bit future.' ... The reality: Yes, Itanium is still warm, still breathing in the rarefied very-high-end server market — where it does have a limited role. But... it certainly hasn't remade the computer industry."

Comments

Re:Itanium would have worked-AMD screwed it for in

[hannson]

I don't know enough about the architectures to say which one is better (x86-64 vs IA-64) but backwards compatibility with x86 is a big win for x86-64.

What about ACE?

[Hal_Porter]

Back in 1999 the ACE Consortium had Compaq, Microsoft, MIPS Computer Systems, DEC, SCO, and a a bunch of others.

The plan was to launch a MIPS based open architecture system running Windows NT or Unix. Back then the MIPS CEO said MIPS would become "the most pervasive architecture in the world". The whole thing fell apart as Compaq defected, MIPS run out of cash and got bought by SGI. Dec obviously moved to supporting Alpha instead. Microsoft shipped NT for MIPS, Alpha and PPC for another few released and then gave up the ghost.

That's it?

[Anonymous Coward]

A short paragraph about Itanium (or, as the Register likes to call it, Itanic)? A few brief paragraphs about PowerPC? A few brief paragraphs about Puma?

Come on. There's a lot more scope for this sort of article. What about Rock, promised three years ago, with tape out two years ago, and yet we're still waiting for systems? What about the iAPX 432?

You've got the basis for a good article, but dear $DEITY, flesh it out! There's more meat on Kate Moss than on this article!

Re:That's it?

[Hal_Porter]

He'd be better off structuring the article as quiche eaters (computer scientists) vs hardware designers.

Hardware designers try to build something which can be clocked fast. They don't care if it's aesthetically pleasing and so on.

Quiche eaters moan about how limited von Neumann architectures are. They try to do a CISCy things like reduce the abstraction level between the programmer and the instruction set with lots of hard to implement features in the instruction set, and design ISA where it is impossible, newspeak style, to write incorrect code (e.g. segmentation or capability based addressing). The hardware engineer way to do this is a TLB and page table.

x86 has had input from both camps, but back compatibility has limited the damage the quiche eaters can do. In the end most of the quiche eater features end up unused (e.g. segmentation and complex instructions) and you end up running ugly, primitive but very fast instructions translated to run on Risc core. It kicked the ass of the quiche eater designed iAPX432 and Itanium.

Of course the dequicheffication of the x86 was to some extent triggered by competion from the very low quiche Risc chips. In fact MIPS did memory protection by implementing only a TLB in hardware, TLB writes and the rest of paging was done in software. Of course, sometimes RISC designs are so fundamentally anti quiche that the very fundamentalism is form of quiche eating, like Sparc's multiply and divide step instructions that ended up being slower than the 68K's full multiple and divide instructions.

Itanium not superior technology at all

[TheLink]

The Itanium is not superior at all.

Even before the AMD64, the Itanium was only good at mainly contrived FPU benchmarks. It was dismal in integer performance.

When you didn't care about x86 compatibility and wanted to spend lots of money for the usual reasons, it was better to go with IBM's offerings like POWER (which is still a decent contender in performance).

Intel couldn't offer you much else other than the CPU. They had to rely on HP, who just left their Tandem and VMS stuff to rot. Yes there were other big names pretending to do Itanium servers, but in practice it was HP.

The Itanic was an EPIC failure.

Re:FTA:

[snowgirl]

The PowerPC architecture was dumped by Apple and failed to challenge Intel in the PC market in a big way.

You missed the proper order. The PowerPC architecture didn't have the money behind it that the x86 architecture did. Take a crappier design but spend a ton more money on it, and you can easily make it faster than a better design.

The PowerPC failed to compete effectively against the Intel/AMD competition, and thus, Apple was pretty much forced to switch because of simple economics.

The Software IS the Computer, Chips Just Carry H2O

[ausoleil]

Reading through the article, it seems that other than AMD's Puma, most of these failures have one thing in common: they are not backward compatible with the chips they replace.

People are loathe to buy a new computer and all-new versions of software to run on it. Look at the 64-bit Windows architectures. How many folks are running 32-bit software on those?

Bottom line is that the software IS the computer and the chips ultimately are sexy only to EE's and gearheads.

Re:Itanium would have worked-AMD screwed it for in

[snowgirl]

Well, I guess having better compilers for IA64 would helped greatly, considering that the architecture's performance is critically depending upon the compiler detecting instructions that are not interdependant.

That's pretty much right on the head there. Intel made the IA64 under the assumption "make a better chip, and the compiler will follow", unfortunately, they didn't realize how much inertia was behind x86. AMD exploited it and POOF, Itanium goes down in flames. :(

Transmeta Crusoe?

[Jeppe Salvesen]

That definitely belongs in there. Sorry, Linus.

They clubbed folks over the head with Itanium...

[JakiChan]

Itanium did one thing well...it killed a lot of other chips. The threat of it killed MIPS post-R12K plans - and the Alpha, and PA-RISC architectures as well.

I remember how SGI kept the team around that was going to work on their next-gen processor while they were negotiating with Intel. These guys had no work - they just played a lot of foosball in good old Building 40 (yeah, Google, you weren't nearly cool enough to build that campus). Then once SGI had sold it's soul they axed the project (and the team). That was a sad day...

POWER and PowerPC?

[dlundh]

Why is that even in there? It "only" powers all three current games consoles and IBMs Power Systems server lines (i and p).

If that's a failure, I hope IBM has many more failures in the future.

Re:Itanium would have worked-AMD screwed it for in

[TheRaven64]

If you make a better chip, the users will follow. But if you make a chip that is marginally better than x86, slower than most of its RISC competitors, and more expensive than anything with similar performance, no one will follow. This is especially true when you release an incredibly power-hungry server chip just as the market is starting to care about performance per Watt.

Compiler support was where it's at.

[k.a.f.]

The Itanium might have had a chance if optimizing compilers had been available that would actually exploit its hardware... but see the following sound bite:

the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific - until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.

(http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856)

When Don Knuth says your chip is impossible to program for, you're in deep, deep trouble.