Ask HN: What killed IA-64? - sakuronto
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CyberFonic
Short answer: Linux on x64 CPUs from Intel and AMD.

I worked with HP-UX on PA-RISC and IA-64 (aka Itanium), IBM AIX on Power and
SUN SunOS/Solaris on Sparc from 1996 to 2005. All three vendors were touting
the advantages of RISC over CISC, i.e. Intel x64 architecture. The reality was
that Intel / AMD CPUs were being manufactured in huge volumes whilst IA-64,
Power & Sparc were niche products with correspondingly high prices.

It is also interesting to note that HP had its proprietary RISC CPUs in the
form PA-RISC family. But due to the enormous cost of designing and building
CPUs they formed an partnership with Intel to co-develop the IA-64 family.

Of course, Intel was making many multiples more money from x64 family so they
didn't put the same level of commitment into the IA-64 product line. This in
turn meant that for any given performance level a multi-socket x64 board was
price and performance competitive with the HP-UX based systems. Systems, e.g.
Integrity series allowed for vPars and other partitioning tricks along with
using FC connected SAN. We are talking multi-million $ systems. It was during
this time that Google and Amazon were publicising their commodity hardware
based massively parallel cluster architecture.

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pwg
As well as the other answers here, an additional reason was that during the
time from announcement to shipping silicon the performance of x86 had improved
such that the Itanium chips were lackluster performers in comparison to a top
end x86 being produced by Intel at the time Itanium shipped silicon.

Couple lackluster performance compared to x86 with a significantly higher
price than the equivalent performance x86 CPU and you get an additional damper
on excitement and corresponding sales.

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qubex
Two things come to mind: poor backwards compatibility and reliance on
compilers to emit optimally ordered code (inherent in the VLSI system
philosophy), which they proved unable to achieve, resulting in comparatively
poor price/performance. Eventually x86_64 came along and provided an
alternative that provided backwards compatibility, horizontal (PC/server)
universality, and most of the purported benefits without the hassle, and the
Itanium came to grief.

~~~
CyberFonic
The C compiler on HP-UX was an extra cost item and it wasn't cheap. Porting
programs to HP-UX often required some tricky changes because the C compiler
wasn't as mature as GCC on x-64 systems of the time.

I recall that once Oracle acquired Sun, they gave priority to getting latest
releases of Oracle RDBMS and JVM running on Sparc before HP-UX and AIX. In the
corporate space Oracle and JVM were pretty much the main game.

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petermcneeley
Ivan Godard discusses the various positives and negatives of IA-64 in his
description of the Mill Computer spread across many videos. (If you really
want to dig deep at a architectural level)
[https://millcomputing.com/docs/pipelining/](https://millcomputing.com/docs/pipelining/)

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rl3
I really miss Mike Magee ripping on this architecture regularly, it was great:

[https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1039092/how-
intels...](https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1039092/how-intels-
itanic-group-spends-its-time)

------
godelmachine
Not exactly answering the question, but was not IA-64 also called as Itanium
architecture? The architecture which promised taking base clock frequency to
10GHz?

~~~
wmf
NetBurst was heading for 10 GHz; I don't know that Itanic ever made that
promise.

