[Info-vax] Dvorak on Itanic

[Paul]

On 2009-01-28 11:10:28 -0600, cook at wvnvms.wvnet.edu (George Cook) said:

> 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.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> 
> George Cook

Oh, they didn't.  It is somewhat accurate to say that Itanium is a bit of a
bastardized descendent of the HP PA-RISC arch. HP was already developing
it when they decided to partner with Intel.

In part for expertise, but more for cost purposes than anything else I think.

Alpha was just a casualty of the HP purchase, and its demise was
based more on financial considerations than anything else.

But in fact, the Itanium is one nicely designed chip from that point of view.
I like it. :)

Now having said that, I really like PowerPC better, but that is in part
because I am still a little bit of a mainframe bigot. PowerPC chips have
similarities (intentional ones) that resemble a mainframe.

The x86 chips just have, IMNSOH, an awful instruction set in comparison
to Itanium and PowerPC, and incidentally, the VAX instruction set.

-Paul