[Info-vax] Dvorak on Itanic

[Tom Linden]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:10:28 -0800, George Cook <cook at wvnvms.wvnet.edu>  
wrote:

> In article <op.uohb97imhv4qyg at murphus.hsd1.ca.comcast.net>, "Tom Linden"  
> <tom at kednos.company> writes:
>> 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
>
> Well, that explains a lot.  Having once been a grad student, I can
> understand how one fresh out of grad school with no real world
> experience could have come up with such an unworkable grandiose pie
> in the sky idea based on nothing but theory.  I had always assumed
> it was dreamed up by some extremely incompetent electronics engineers.

You made a bit of a jump there.  He was hired into a team becaquse of his
compiler background not to design the chip himself.  This was only  
mentioned
as a timeline checkpoint.
>
>> 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.
>
> Suckered?  Maybe, but I suspect Intel also used grad students and
> incompetent engineers who agreed that it was the "end all be all"
> of CPU architectures.
>
> The part I still don't understand is how the otherwise apparently
> very competent Alpha CPU architects bought into it.  Must have been
> the same type of irrational group think that got us into the current
> economic mess.  Unfortunately there are few people who are able to
> avoid the trap of "group think", Steve Jobs being one example, which
> is why he is so critical to Apple's continued success.
>
Well, in the beginning the Alpha engineers got a lot of things wrong, but
that is because there was no serious engineering management to ride heard
on these cowboys.

>
> George Cook



-- 
PL/I for OpenVMS
www.kednos.com