With the benefit of 2020 hindsight, there would not be an Itanium today.
More Quotes from Gordon Haff:
Basically, no one ever used hardware-based IA-32 execution, so better to use the silicon for something else. Of course, basically no one uses software-based emulation either, but at least that doesn't cost chip real estate.Gordon Haff
The fact that Itanium didn't take off as expected is really because it is only in certain types of applications such as databases that there was a driving need to go beyond 32-bit to the larger memory you see in RISC servers today. But 64-bit extensions to x86 are here, and there is no penalty to having a server that is capable of supporting 64-bit, whether you need it or not. That's the nice thing about the x64 approach.
Gordon Haff
Intel let a competitor sneak into a market where they weren't before. Still, it was hard to believe that AMD would be able to maintain the kind of performance lead that they have enjoyed over the past one to two years.
Gordon Haff
Sun has to keep up with the other guys. IBM is going to be coming out with the Power5 soon. The reality is in this industry you have to put a lot of energy into running to stay in place. What happens if you don't make these kinds of advances is you fall behind. So this upgrade is in some respects about maintaining parity with the competition.
Gordon Haff
It's not like Dell had been making investments in Itanium and suddenly decided it wasn't going to do that and pull back its support. It had a relatively older product it wasn't promoting at all, and it really doesn't have a near-term path where it could move forward if it wanted to.
Gordon Haff
The problem is, to be at that nirvana, Apple would have to have the ISVs increase their investment on Apple hardware, at least in the transition. That is very difficult for Apple.
Gordon Haff
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