[Info-vax] Dvorak on Itanic

[Tom Linden]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:10:04 -0800, David Mathog <mathog at caltech.edu>  
wrote:

> Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
>> John Smith (not the one @ HP) wrote:
>>> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp
>
>> Itanic toes seem to have been "sailing under a curse".
>
> Well, in terms of actually getting out the door and working as promised,  
>   sure.  But in one sense it was immensely blessed.  Throughout all of  
> this nonsense, where all the computer manufacturers were not only  
> talking about deemphasizing their own CPUs, but in some cases (MIPS,  
> Alpha) actually doing so, and pinning future development on Intel's  
> great white hope, there was no anti-trust action whatsoever.  Not even a  
> hint of it.  Were not there actions more than a little anticompetitive?  
> To me it seems analogous to the hypothetical situation where Lexmark,  
> Canon, and HP, announce that henceforth all of their printers would only  
> use Epson print cartridges.
>
> The only company that didn't buy into this nonsense was AMD.  Now that  
> may have been because Intel wouldn't let them in on the party, but in  
> any case, they had to respond, and eventually pushed the Opteron out the  
> door, thereby showing everybody just how naked the Emperor really was.  
> The rest is history.
>
> Regards,
>
> David Mathog
>

IIRC this started as an HP poject.  One of Jack Davidson's grad students  
got
hired by HP ca. 1992 to work on the VLIW arch, and don't forget that a  
couple
of years ago HP committed to putting in another $3B to the Intel effort,  
so in
some ways I think Intel got suckered, although the $3B would mitigate the  
pain.



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