It's remarkably common and heavily incentivized.
Had Itanium been a success then Intel would have crushed the competition (however it did succeed in killing Alpha, SPARC, and workstation MIPS).
On servers, 32 bit x86 was doing wonders for small workloads. AMD64 quickly chipped away at the places where 1-4 processor SPARC would have previously been used.
It could not run x86 apps faster than x86 cpus, so it didn't compete in the MS Windows world. Itanium was a headache for compiler writers as it was very difficult to optimize for, so it was difficult to get good performance out of Itanium and difficult to emulate x86.
Itanium was introduced after the dot-com crash, so the marked was flooded with cheap slightly used SPARC systems, putting even more pressure on price.
This is unlike when Apple introduced Macs with PowerPC cpus: they had much higher performance than the 68040 cpu they replaced. PowerPC was price competetive and easy to write optimizing compilers for.
So ironically announcing Itanium was genius, but then they should have just canceled it.
No one wanted Itanium. It was another political project designed to take the wind out of HP and Sun's sails, with the bonus that it would cut off access to AMD.
Meanwhile AMD released AMD64 (aka x86-64) and customers started buying it in droves. Eventually Intel was forced to admit defeat and adopt AMD64. That was possible because of the long-standing cross-licensing agreement between the two companies that gave AMD rights to x86 way back when nearly all CPUs had to have "second source" vendors. FWIW Intel felt butt-hurt at the time, thinking the chips AMD had to offer (like I/O controllers) weren't nearly as valuable as Intel's CPUs. But a few decades later the agreement ended up doing well for Intel. At one point Intel made some noise about suing AMD for something or another (AVX?) but someone in their legal department quickly got rid of whoever proposed nonsense like that because all current Intel 64-bit CPUs rely on the AMD license.
That was an intentional act to force customers into Itanium, which was 64 bit from the outset.
They have been trying half-heartedly with GPUs on and off since the late 1990's i740 series.
The root cause is probably the management mantra "focus on core competencies". They had an effective monopoly on fast CPUs from 2007 until 2018. This monopoly meant very little improvement in CPU speed.
Apple and Microsoft have both managed to avoid this, and been the exception.
They are a dead company walking.
They don’t want to be selling faster x86 CPUs in the cloud, they want you to buy more vcpu units instead, and they want those units to be arm. And that’s how they’ve structured their offerings. It’s not the limit of what’s possible, just what is currently the most profitable approach for Amazon and google.
IF (big IF) the trend continues we might see Intel and AMD get pretty close, and a lot more comptetion on the market again (I hope)
On the server side, I don't have the number but that's probably a way harder turf to protect for Intel going forward, if they're even still ahead ?
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-int...
[...] when Intel’s manufacturing prowess hit a wall Intel’s designs were exposed. Gelsinger told me: 'So all of a sudden, as Warren Buffet says, “You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.” [...]'
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/f...
I wonder how many of our companies will survive at the top for even 20 more years?
https://companiesmarketcap.com/
Berkshire is the only one I feel sure about because they hold lots of different companies.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
As of Nov 2023, BRK has ~915.5M AAPL shares, with a market cap of $172B. BRK’s market cap is $840B.
Per the CNBC link, the market cap of BRK’s AAPL holding is 46% of the market cap of BRK’s publicly listed holdings, but BRK’s market cap being much higher than $172B/46% means there is $840B - $374B = $466B worth of market cap in BRK’s non publicly listed assets.
I would say $172/$840 = 20% is more representative of BRK’s AAPL proportion.
Datacenters were and still are full of monstrous Xeons, and for a good reason.
To ask the foolish question, why? My guess would be power efficiency. I've only ever seen them in workstations, and in that use-case it was the number of cores that was the main advantage.
Space and power in datacenters are at a premium; packing so many pretty decent cores into one CPU allows to run a ton of cloud VMs on a physically compact server.
AMD EPYC, by the way, follows the same dtatcenter-oriented pattern.