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0 pointsphire17h ago0 comments

What I find interesting is that Intel engineers actually designed their own 64-bit extension, somewhere along the same lines as AMD64.

Intel's marketing department threw a fit, they didn't want the Pentium 4 competing with their flagship Itanium. Bob Colwell was directly ordered to remove the 64-bit functionality.

Which he kind of did, kind of didn't. The functionally was still there, but fused off when Netburst shipped.

If it wasn't for AMD beating them to market with AMD64, Intel would have probably eventually allowed their engineers to enable the 64-bit extension. And when it did come time to add AMD64 support to the Pentium 4 (later Prescott and Cedar Mill models) the existing 64-bit support probably made for a good starting point.

Bob Colwell talks about this (and some of the x86 team vs Itanium team drama) in his quora answer and followup comments: https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-deli...

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p_l16h ago

Around the time of K8 being released, I remember reading official intel roadmaps announced to normal people, and they essentially planned that for at least few more years if not more they will segment into increasingly consumer-only 32bit and IA-64 on the higher end

twoodfin16h ago

Itanium was bonkers in lots of ways—very cool in others.

But this market segmentation idea just seems absolutely insane to me in a way I’ve never had anyone satisfactorily explain.

It requires Intel to voluntarily destroy the commodity economics that put their CPUs on a rocket ship to domination.

It’s as if they actually bought into the RISC FUD from the 1990’s that x86 was unscalable, exactly when it was taking its biggest leaps.

AdamN15h ago

They were trying to compete with Sun and IBM in the server space (SPARC and Power) and thought that they needed a totally pro architecture (which Itanium was). The baggage of 32-bit x86 would have just slowed it all down. However having an x86-64 would have confused customers in the middle.

Think back then it was all about massive databases - that was where the big money was and x86 wasn't really setup for the top end load patterns of databases (or OLAP data lakes).

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phireOP14h ago

> It’s as if they actually bought into the RISC FUD from the 1990’s that x86 was unscalable, exactly when it was taking its biggest leaps.

That's exactly what was happening.

Though it helps to realise that this argument was taking place inside Intel around 1997. The Pentium II is only just hitting the market, it wasn't exactly obvious that x86 was right in the middle making its biggest leaps.

RISC was absolutely dominating the server/workstation space, this was slightly before the rise of the cheap x86 server. Intel management was desperate to break into the server/workstation space, and they knew they needed a high end RISC cpu. It was kind of general knowledge in the computer space at the time that RISC was the future.

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rob7415h ago

Well, TBH it wasn't all FUD - hanging on to x86 eventually (much later) came back to bite them when x86 CPUs weren't competitive for tablets and smartphones, leading to Apple developing their own ARM-based RISC CPUs (which run circles around the previous x86 CPUs) and dumping Intel altogether.

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0 pointsphire17h ago0 comments

What I find interesting is that Intel engineers actually designed their own 64-bit extension, somewhere along the same lines as AMD64.

Intel's marketing department threw a fit, they didn't want the Pentium 4 competing with their flagship Itanium. Bob Colwell was directly ordered to remove the 64-bit functionality.

Which he kind of did, kind of didn't. The functionally was still there, but fused off when Netburst shipped.

Bob Colwell talks about this (and some of the x86 team vs Itanium team drama) in his quora answer and followup comments: https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-deli...

0 comments

p_l16h ago

twoodfin16h ago

Itanium was bonkers in lots of ways—very cool in others.

But this market segmentation idea just seems absolutely insane to me in a way I’ve never had anyone satisfactorily explain.

It requires Intel to voluntarily destroy the commodity economics that put their CPUs on a rocket ship to domination.

It’s as if they actually bought into the RISC FUD from the 1990’s that x86 was unscalable, exactly when it was taking its biggest leaps.

AdamN15h ago

Think back then it was all about massive databases - that was where the big money was and x86 wasn't really setup for the top end load patterns of databases (or OLAP data lakes).

1 more reply

phireOP14h ago

> It’s as if they actually bought into the RISC FUD from the 1990’s that x86 was unscalable, exactly when it was taking its biggest leaps.

That's exactly what was happening.

2 more replies

rob7415h ago

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