Chip Designers Recall the Big AMD-Intel Battle Over x86-64 Support (tomshardware.com) 17
Tom's Hardware reports on some interesting hardware history being shared on X.com:
AMD engineer Phil Park identified a curious nugget of PC architectural history from, of all places, a year-old Quora answer posted by former Intel engineer [and Pentium Pro architect] Robert Colwell. The nugget indicates that Intel could have beaten AMD to the x86-64 punch if the former wasn't dead-set on the x64-only Itanium line of CPUs.
Colwell had responded on Quora to the question "Shouldn't Intel with its vast resources have been able to develop both architectures?" This was a marketing decision by Intel — they believed, probably rightly, that bringing out a new 64-bit feature in the x86 would be perceived as betting against their own native-64-bit Itanium, and might well severely damage Itanium's chances. I was told, not once, but twice, that if I "didn't stop yammering about the need to go 64-bits in x86 I'd be fired on the spot" and was directly ordered to take out that 64-bit stuff. I decided to split the difference, by leaving in the gates but fusing off the functionality. That way, if I was right about Itanium and what AMD would do, Intel could very quickly get back in the game with x86. As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what did happen.
Phil Park continued the discussion on X.com. "He didn't quite get what he wanted, but he got close since they had x86-64 support in subsequent products when Intel made their comeback." (So, Park posted later in the thread, "I think he won the long game.")
Park also shared a post from Nicholas Wilt (NVIDIA CUDA designer who earlier did GPU computing work at Microsoft and built the prototype for Windows Desktop Manager): I have an x86-64 story of my own. I pressed a friend at AMD to develop an alternative to Itanium. "For all the talk about Wintel," I told him, "these companies bear no love for one another. If you guys developed a 64-bit extension of x86, Microsoft would support it...."
Interesting coda: When it became clear that x86-64 was beating Itanium in the market, Intel reportedly petitioned Microsoft to change the architecture and Microsoft told Intel to pound sand.
Colwell had responded on Quora to the question "Shouldn't Intel with its vast resources have been able to develop both architectures?" This was a marketing decision by Intel — they believed, probably rightly, that bringing out a new 64-bit feature in the x86 would be perceived as betting against their own native-64-bit Itanium, and might well severely damage Itanium's chances. I was told, not once, but twice, that if I "didn't stop yammering about the need to go 64-bits in x86 I'd be fired on the spot" and was directly ordered to take out that 64-bit stuff. I decided to split the difference, by leaving in the gates but fusing off the functionality. That way, if I was right about Itanium and what AMD would do, Intel could very quickly get back in the game with x86. As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what did happen.
Phil Park continued the discussion on X.com. "He didn't quite get what he wanted, but he got close since they had x86-64 support in subsequent products when Intel made their comeback." (So, Park posted later in the thread, "I think he won the long game.")
Park also shared a post from Nicholas Wilt (NVIDIA CUDA designer who earlier did GPU computing work at Microsoft and built the prototype for Windows Desktop Manager): I have an x86-64 story of my own. I pressed a friend at AMD to develop an alternative to Itanium. "For all the talk about Wintel," I told him, "these companies bear no love for one another. If you guys developed a 64-bit extension of x86, Microsoft would support it...."
Interesting coda: When it became clear that x86-64 was beating Itanium in the market, Intel reportedly petitioned Microsoft to change the architecture and Microsoft told Intel to pound sand.
Nobody looked good after all was said and done (Score:4, Insightful)
N/T
ia64 was the gold-plated toilet no one wanted (Score:2)
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For servers, yes but I don't ever recall seeing Itanium in a laptop.
Intel really only got serious when Jobs asked for a 64bit roadmap out of the Pentium M mobile architecture after IBM stalled on a PowerPC G5 laptop.
Intel tried to own the processor market by fiat (Score:3)
But failed to control the entirety of the stack.
It is telling that Intel, even that early (along with HP), was trying to leverage their assumed dominance to dictate standards, even when their customers wanted something different. Is it any surprise that in the face of that attitude, mobile abandoned intel to adopt ARM, as did Apple, specifically over power consumption?
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HP had the alpha too the fastest RISC processor in the world and far easier and cheaper to make for the far more expensive and inferior and overclocked/hot and terrible to write for Itanium. Intel was too scary.
Again this shows politics wins not actual competence. I am greatful we have AMD. I shudder to think if IA64 won out if AMD did not exist or we would still be using 32 bit x86 with 4 gigs of ram to this day and be back to 2014 performance levels still.
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Do you mean PA-RISC? Alpha was always a DEC product.
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Yes, but weird enough, there was a time when HP sold and supported Alpha machines but they didn't own the intellectual property -- which had already been sold by Compaq to Intel before HP had bought Compaq.
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Alpha wasn't far easier to make and was very difficult to scale since a lot of its design was done by hand (hence the speed) and as the CPUs grew in complexity, that was not feasible anymore.
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Kinda cool (Score:2)
to see confirmation of what once seemed mythical, in that there was always the rumours being spouted. You know, 640 KB is more than enough. ;)
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A whole lot of developer tools settled on "x64" to both shorten things and to avoid the politics of siding with a CPU maker.
If you want to target a 64 bit x64 platform in Visual Studio, the build target is "x64".
Re: What is "x64 Itanium" ? (Score:2)
With the .Net architecture the underlying hardware is less important.
But I can imagine that the management of Intel had a wtf moment when AMD dropped their x64 processor and even more so when Microsoft told them off.
Unfortunately Intel lost their momentum again so the 2010's didn't see much performance increase.
The PA-Risc was 64 bit already in the 1990s but the pricing and marketing was server/workstation and not consumer. It could have been fun if HP actually had made a home computer based on that, but it
MS did not love it (Score:2)
I was part of the team at SUSE that AMD hired to do the Linux port to x86-64. They (the AMD guys we worked with) told us that they did reach out to Microsoft, but was basically told to go away.
What they didn't answer was whether AMD would have hired SUSE to do this, if MS had done the port.
But it did turn out very well. We had a complete, native port for the chip when they got the first prototypes of the chip, and it just worked right away. They were ecstatic :)
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AMD asked M$ to port the Linux kernel to run on AMD64 native? Early 2000s ... lets see ... SCO vs IBM ... red cape to bull ... M$ must have nearly exploded in a fit of indignant rage!
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