On: Intel, SiFive Demo High-Performance RISC-V on Intel 4

[mepian]

It was indeed successful at killing PA-RISC, high-end MIPS, and Alpha, because their owners (HP, SGI, Compaq) abandoned them for Itanium.

[klelatti → mepian]

You think Itanium was entirely successful then?

My point is that it doesn't matter how good the architecture is or if a few firms follow you - you need it to be successful in the market.

If you think Itanium was a cunning plan to take a few competitors out of the market only to abandon a few years later then we'll have to disagree.

[xorcist → klelatti]

Itanium was absolutely a plan to take out the competitors in the unix- and minicomputer market, where margins were much, much higher than in the generic x86 market. That worked. SGI, Digital, HP, Compaq/Tandem, they all fell.

It was not necessarily the plan to abandon the architecture, but once it was won, it also wasn't terribly important to keep going. Much like most corporate takeovers to this day.

Intel would have been happy to keep the market segmented for a few more years, but what happened instead was that the market vacuum was filled by Linux and x86 instead. That would likely have happened sooner or later anyway, but there you go.

[klelatti → xorcist]

Correlation is not causation.