Comment by cpgxiii

> It's worth noting that Google actually did succeed with a wildly different architecture a couple years later. They figured "Well, if CPU performance is hitting a wall - why use just one CPU? Why not put together thousands of commodity CPUs that individually are not that powerful, and then use software to distribute workloads across those CPUs?" And the obvious objection to that is "If we did that, it won't be compatible with all the products out there that depend upon x86 binary compatibility", and Google's response was the ultimate in hubris: "Well we'll just build new products then, ones that are bigger and better than the whole industry." Miraculously it worked, and made a multi-trillion-dollar company (multiple multi-trillion-dollar companies, if you now consider how AWS, Facebook, TSMC, and NVidia revenue depends upon the cloud).

Except "the cloud" at that point was specifically just a large number of normal desktop-architecture machines. Specifically not a new ISA or machine type, running entirely normal OS and libraries. At no point did Google or Amazon or Microsoft make people port/rewrite all of their software for cloud deployment.

At the point that Google's "bunch of cheap computers" was new, CPU performance was still rapidly improving. The competition was traditional "big iron" or mainframe systems, and the novelty was in achieving high reliability through distribution, rather than building on fault-tolerant hardware. By the time the rate of CPU performance improvement was slowing in the mid 2000s, large clusters smaller machines were omnipresent in supercomputing and HPC applications.

The real "new architecture(s)" of this century are GPUs, but much of the development and success of them is the result of many iterations and a lot of convergent evolution.