The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to
everybody and still nobody likes him.
-- Jim Samuels
Intel spent billions of dollars trying to make Itanic a thing. They schemed with HP to buy and kill Alpha, in spite of the fact that at the time Alpha was in some of the fastest supercomputers in the world. They shot themselves in the foot by avoiding adopting amd64 extensions for so long in their x86 processors and doing other seemingly brain-dead things that only make sense when examined in the light of their desire to push Itanic.
They made deals all across the industry to get people to sign up to support Itanic, and in the end people got a very mediocre CPU that always promised more than it delivered and always cost significantly more for the same amount of performance elsewhere.
In the meanwhile, Alpha is still supported by gcc, has repositories of tens of thousands of current binary packages, and still has options for modern open source OSes. m68k has gcc and clang support. Heck - even VAX has ongoing gcc support.
You can barely give away an Itanic system these days. It truly is a very sad architecture.
OTOH, some people are still having fun with Itanic systems:
>Intel spent billions of dollars trying to make Itanic a thing. They schemed with HP to buy and kill Alpha, in spite of the fact that at the time Alpha was in some of the fastest supercomputers in the world. They shot themselves in the foot by avoiding adopting amd64 extensions for so long in their x86 processors and doing other seemingly brain-dead things that only make sense when examined in the light of their desire to push Itanic.
Intel has failed, or at least failed to distinguish itself, in *every single market* it has entered since IBM chose the 8088 forty years ago: Every non-x86 instructional set CPU, flash memory, antivirus (still perhaps the most mystifying move in Intel history), servers/motherboards, and GPUs come to mind. The most successful non-x86 business for Intel is ... Ethernet cards? Meanwhile, it's embarrassed itself with discrete GPUs at least three separate times. A few years ago buying Nvidia would have been a savvy move; now it can no longer do so, and it's not impossible to imagine Nvidia buying Intel in the future.
Even within the one market Intel does dominate, what saved the company 20 years ago amid Itanic and Pentium 4 was 1) AMD Thunderbird being just as inefficient as Pentium 4 and, more importantly, 2) an Intel Israel skunk works project to improve on the Pentium 3. There is no such out-of-the-blue miracle this time.
>Intel has failed, or at least failed to distinguish itself, in every single market it has entered since IBM chose the 8088 forty years ago:
This is just wrong, unless you mean by "distinguish itself" as "redefine the market" or something superlative like that.
Intel's big successes have been in chips that support their CPUs. Motherboard chipsets (northbridges), WiFi chips (basically the standard in many laptops), etc. Also, their GPUs have been very successful, but only for integrated graphics. Just look at countless corporate laptops over the last 10-15 years: all the parts inside are by Intel: CPU+iGPU, WiFi, USB, etc. Load up Linux on one, and then run "lspci". Corporate laptops have been dominated by Intel for ages.
Also, Intel has done well with a lot of enterprise-grade and server components, like Ethernet adapters.
Yeah, they did miss the high-end GPU market, but for most computers you really don't want a high-end GPU: they're expensive and power-hungry, and far more than you need for using Excel and Word and watching videos on YouTube. Laptops with discrete GPUs have horrible battery life; I'm unfortunately stuck with one of these beasts for my work, when I don't use its capabilities at all, and the battery doesn't last more than 1-2 hours despite the thing weighing a ton. (Someone high-up in the company thought that we "need" these things just because we're devs.)
Aside from wifi chips, you haven't mentioned anything that Intel does that the person to whom you're responding hasn't mentioned. Support chips go with CPUs, and integrated video is also part of their CPUs.
What "enterprise" gear have they done, besides ethernet controllers?
I think the point stands - aside from some not very significant cases, Intel has been a one trick pony for ages. They haven't even been doing their one trick very well - both AMD and Apple have handed Intel their ass in the last several years.
Think of how many times Intel caught themselves out - they've taken too many shortcuts to try to one up and we've suffered as a result. Skylake bugs? All the variants of Spectre and Meltdown? 14 nm for countless years? Netburst? Atom CPUs that brick themselves after a while and require literal, physical replacement?
Intel's current products focus on benchmarks and marketing more than on actual performance - they throw hundreds of watts at a CPU to get faster immediate performance, but their CPUs can't maintain that for long. Sure, it might win a bit at games, but I wouldn't want an Intel for compiling.
I'm not sure what you expect here: for Intel to dominate a bunch of very different silicon-based product lines? They already dominate(d) CPUs and chipsets and WiFi chips, what more do you want?
Let's compare to Facebook: what do they dominate? The Facebook social network service, and I suppose Instagram, plus some other "support" stuff like Messenger. How about Ebay? Are they some kind of failure because they're a "one trick pony" with their auction site? Is Comcast a failure because all they have is cable TV and cable internet? I guess Toyota is a failure too because all they make is motor vehicles. I find your criticism frankly bizarre.
1) I wouldn't say they dominate the wifi chip market. They're not particularly power efficient, but they're often part of the package that one gets when one gets Intel chipsets.
2) "Dominating" in CPU chipsets is... Well, it's a silly metric, because it's included in their CPU business. It's not like they're providing CPU chipsets for competing CPUs.
So yes, I'd expect one of the largest chipmakers on the planet to have SOME aptitude making products other than CPUs and their chipsets, wifi chips and ethernet chips.
How about storage controllers? They had Xscale until they sold it. How about flash? They've made some good SSDs, but never differentiated themselves in any of speed, quality or performance. GPUs? We know how that has gone - even though they have years of experience with integrated GPUs, they're shipping drivers that are embarrassingly bad. Low power, portable SOCs? The Atom has horrible performance/watt, so much so that MIPS and PowerPC are still used significantly more often than x86 in set top boxes, NAT routers, and so on. Their attempts to make a chipset for cable modems gave us the infamous Intel Puma chipset that has been plagued with problems for years and that Intel still hasn't fixed, after knowing about those problems and releasing a whole new generation.
I still stand by the one trick pony comparison, unless you can think of some business where Intel stands out.
I'd have to see a reference for that. Digital was still an independent company for several years after what would become IA-64 was publicly unveiled and HP didn't end up acquiring Digital by way of Compaq for a few years after that.
"As part of the roadmap to phase out Alpha-, MIPS- and PA-RISC-based systems in favor of Itanium-based systems at HP, the most recent AlphaServer systems reached their end of general availability on 27 April 2007."
"Seen by both executives at HP and Compaq as a redundant overlapping product under the new merged company and with Intel's IA-64 efforts underway, the Alpha -- arguably a much more mature, better supported and more desirable platform was phased out."
From Wikipedia:
"On June 25, 2001, Compaq announced that Alpha would be phased out by 2004 in favor of Intel's Itanium, canceled the planned EV8 chip, and sold all Alpha intellectual property to Intel.[6] Hewlett-Packard merged with Compaq in 2002; HP announced that development of the Alpha series would continue for a few more years, including the release of a 1.3 GHz EV7 variant named the EV7z. This would be the final iteration of Alpha, the 0.13 µm EV79 also being canceled."
All of this in spite of having a large number of supercomputers in the Top500 list, lots of actively developed scientific computing software optimized for Alpha, and features that other CPUs wouldn't have for years.
What that quote is about is that a then HP competitor (and a big Intel partner), Compaq decided that Itanium was the 64-bit future; a lot of companies were making at least contingency plans to support Itanium over in-house designs. But Intel didn't do Itanium with HP to specifically have an impact on Alpha.
> Intel spent billions of dollars trying to make Itanic a thing.
You're looking at that wrong.
Intel spent a gigabuck and scared everybody else out of the space. That's a brilliant business manuever even if the tech was a failure.
The only company left in the space afterward was IBM with POWER. Intel basically wiped out DEC(Alpha), SGI, MIPS, HP (PA-RISC), and Sun (Sparc) for a gigabuck.
The only part of Itanium that annoys me is that it's squatting on the IA-64 abbreviation.
IA-16 is 16-bit x86, retroactively. IA-32 is 32-bit x86. Easy-peasy. But IA-64 is this oddball architecture that has no relevance to anyone's life anymore and it breaks the pattern. It wasn't even Intel's design to begin with, it was HP's. Bah.
...but also says "including results for @jhamby ritanium" and has a link "search instead for @jhamby itanium". If you click that, then Top works. (Note my iOS Twitter app version is somewhat old, so I guess I can't guarantee that this specific sequence doesn't work for you.)
They made deals all across the industry to get people to sign up to support Itanic, and in the end people got a very mediocre CPU that always promised more than it delivered and always cost significantly more for the same amount of performance elsewhere.
In the meanwhile, Alpha is still supported by gcc, has repositories of tens of thousands of current binary packages, and still has options for modern open source OSes. m68k has gcc and clang support. Heck - even VAX has ongoing gcc support.
You can barely give away an Itanic system these days. It truly is a very sad architecture.
OTOH, some people are still having fun with Itanic systems:
https://twitter.com/search?q=%40jhamby%20itanium