On 06/22/2017 04:41 PM, mathog wrote: > On 22-Jun-2017 15:05, Greg Lindahl wrote: >> I don't think it hurt AMD that much in the end. > > I disagree.
It's hard to say. I agree that AMD very slowly managed to claw some small market share from intel with the Opteron. I believe it was on the order of 10-15%. Took years for Intel to give up on Itanium and start pushing the more competitive nehalem based servers with an on chip memory controller. > AMD had a product that Intel could not match at the time but was unable to > capitalize on that advantage due to non-market forces. (Ie, the game was > rigged.) I don't doubt Intel was pressuring partners to stick with Intel. Financial incentives for shipping only Intel, "marketing" budgets for vendors to use as they see fit, etc. Then again AMD had problems with bugs, missed deadlines, chip yields, and meeting demand. Not sure if 30% of the market had wanted opterons that AMD could have handled it. At the time they only had their own fabs, unlike today where they can use the split off global foundaries or any of the other fabs. > case having convinced Digital to axe the Alpha, SGI to drop MIPS, and HP to > give > up PA-RISC. IBM and Sun wisely avoided drinking this Kool-Aid. IBM I believe. Seems like Sun took it hook line and sinker. My memory is somewhat vague, but I believe they ported Solaris to Itanium and only afterwards killed it off when they realized that Itanium was never going to be a desirable chip for their desired market. Not sure MIPS and PARISC were going to be competitive anyways, but losing alpha seemed like a waste. Although I've heard discussions claiming some of the Alpha IP ended up in one of the China Supercomputer CPUs. Dec published some very promising papers on the performance they expected from the SMT enabled alpha... which never shipped. Itanium seemed "ACE" workstation all over again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Computing_Environment). _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
