Itanium killed x86 compatibility, this had zero chance of success in commodity market, and medium to little in server space. You cant jump out with no user base product when your competitor (AMD) offers better and cheaper processors.
I am proposing removing _unused_ compatibility hacks. No one sane uses Virtual mode. I wonder how much silicon real estate is taken by all this garbage.
Was that through technical failing, or was the project just mismanaged into the ground like the Alpha? Or was it killed by AMD's backward-compatible 64-bit architecture?
Itanium failed to deliver on its basic promise: the simple in-order VLIW design was intended to be much easier to implement in hardware than the complex out-of-order RISC designs with long pipelines that everybody else (including Intel x86/AMD64) was doing, but then the various actual Itanium CPUs were notorious for being released years later than initially announced, and due to the delays the available out-of-order RISCs were usually much faster.
Itanium killed x86 compatibility, this had zero chance of success in commodity market, and medium to little in server space. You cant jump out with no user base product when your competitor (AMD) offers better and cheaper processors.
I am proposing removing _unused_ compatibility hacks. No one sane uses Virtual mode. I wonder how much silicon real estate is taken by all this garbage.
Was that through technical failing, or was the project just mismanaged into the ground like the Alpha? Or was it killed by AMD's backward-compatible 64-bit architecture?
Itanium failed to deliver on its basic promise: the simple in-order VLIW design was intended to be much easier to implement in hardware than the complex out-of-order RISC designs with long pipelines that everybody else (including Intel x86/AMD64) was doing, but then the various actual Itanium CPUs were notorious for being released years later than initially announced, and due to the delays the available out-of-order RISCs were usually much faster.