Re:Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP
by hakfoo on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @11:23PM
(#37760496)
I wonder how much of that was each one being largely one-vendor operations. Even high-margin markets like servers and HPC can't compete with selling a billion cheap chips for white-boxes.
If there had been an "Alpha Inc" akin to the ARM Ltd model, I wonder if the platform could have survived longer. It might be able to tap firms that want to play in the high end market, but weren't interested in buying from a direct competitor (picturing those big beige Dell Poweredge PII cubes, but with Alphas in them), or they might have gotten a better deal out of stuff like AMD using the EV6 bus for the Athlon.
Aside from that, I suspect there was a significant aspect of vapourware to the Itanium strategy. Peak Intel had great manufacturing process and an endless bankroll; it was easy to assume that they'd deliver a product that would be impossible to compete with, may as well give up on another architecture. By the time the Itanium product shipped and everyone saw what a lemon it is, it was too late to reallocate the resources and make up for years of lost effort.
If there had been an "Alpha Inc" akin to the ARM Ltd model, I wonder if the platform could have survived longer. It might be able to tap firms that want to play in the high end market, but weren't interested in buying from a direct competitor (picturing those big beige Dell Poweredge PII cubes, but with Alphas in them), or they might have gotten a better deal out of stuff like AMD using the EV6 bus for the Athlon.
Aside from that, I suspect there was a significant aspect of vapourware to the Itanium strategy. Peak Intel had great manufacturing process and an endless bankroll; it was easy to assume that they'd deliver a product that would be impossible to compete with, may as well give up on another architecture. By the time the Itanium product shipped and everyone saw what a lemon it is, it was too late to reallocate the resources and make up for years of lost effort.