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Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: [?] Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems



>> Indeed.  Also, they wanted to move away from the i386 instruction set
>> so as not to be bothered by pre-existing licensing agreements with
>> AMD, and thus making sure there'd be no competing implementation.  The
>> IA64 architecture was quite complex, and there are reasons to believe
>> that complexity was seen as a virtue (makes it easier to get more
>> patents and keep competitors out).
> HP then also poured additional stuff into the architecture to make
> migration from PA-RISC easier.  I imagine this also made stuff vastly
> more complex.

It has all the signs of a "design by committee" were you get the union
of all the ideas, indeed :-(

But I think for such a thing to get the time and funding needed to get
to production, there needs to be a commitment to the idea that such
complexity is good.

> I think, IBM is big enough and old enough and established enough with
> POWER that a "young whippersnapper" like Intel is no real danger to them
> in their own enclosed Mainframe walled garden. I believe Apple moving
> away from PowerPC did more damage to IBMs aspirations in that market.

Agreed.

> For the others: they where either on board from the start (like HP),
> where already dead (like DEC/Compaq) or slipping into the embedded
> market (like MIPS).

I didn't want to imply that they would have survived (that slice of the
CPU market was shrinking fast anyway: after the Pentium Pro, they were
not noticeably faster than PCs any more and the market was too small to
keep financing the development of leading CPUs, especially since for
high-end machines all the value was in the interconnect rather than the
CPUs anyway), but the IA64 was explicitly the end of it for them (and
that happened long before the first IA64 CPU was available).

> And SPARC: after being bought by Oracle, the end was more or less
> directly clear.

But that took place much later: the IA64 buzz that killed Alpha/PA/MIPS
was in the 90s whereas Oracle bought SPARC in 2009.

> Indeed. The German computer magazine c't had many interesting articles
> about the IA64 architecture and also quite early painted its dark
> future, because of ever slipping sales figures, performance problems,
> the failure to deliver on made promises and the increasing pressure of
> the i386/amd64 architectures.

>From a purely technical perspective, it's hard to understand how Intel
managed to pour so much energy into such an obviously bad idea.
The only explanations seem all to be linked to market strategies.


        Stefan


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