[Info-vax] Sunway TaihuLight is the fastest supercomputer in the world

[lawrencedo99 at gmail.com]

On Wednesday, June 22, 2016 at 4:14:33 AM UTC+12, Gianluca Bonetti wrote:
> Could have been HP to build such a computer made out of Alpha chips, but they
> bet on Itanium.

To be fair, around 1990 or so it was felt by a lot of people that x86 would run out of steam in another decade. So you had Apple-IBM-Motorola betting on PowerPC (to be fair, those early Pentium 60 and 66MHz chips were bloody horrible); and of course a bunch of folks making and using MIPS chips. Imagine what could have happened if DEC had let others make Alpha chips, the way MIPS and ARM designs were licensed?

What kept x86 going for so much longer was the fact that the sheer volume of sales allowed Intel to spend 10 times as much on its complex chip designs as the others could afford for their simpler RISC-based designs. But even so, Intel (quite uncharacteristically) saw no future for a 64-bit extension of x86.

It was AMD that bet (correctly) that the sheer weight of backward compatibility would help that 64-bit extension prevail against IA-64. It pioneered AMD64, then lost the marketing edge and gave Intel time to realize its mistake and regain the lead.