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

plus 1, tRoll)

[Anonymous Coward]

lea3 to '3leaner

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I would argue that binary software is what makes progress. Open source software never innovates, it just tries to copy commercial software, usually quite poorly. You can't have commercial software without binary only distribution, otherwise you are giving potential competitors all of your hard work. This makes competitors take different routes and innovate with their own software, pushing functionality and feature sets.

If your chip doesn't play well with gcc,

[mkcmkc]

...your chip sucks. Given that there was nothing other than greed that prevented Intel from making gcc the best Itanium compiler on the planet, I'd say they just plain screwed the pooch on this one.