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A Brief History of Chip Hype and Flops

Posted by kdawson on from the open-mouth-insert-marketing dept.

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."

5 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Itanium would have worked-AMD screwed it for in by hannson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. That's it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  3. Itanium not superior technology at all by TheLink · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
  4. POWER and PowerPC? by dlundh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Compiler support was where it's at. by k.a.f. · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.