384
Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
384 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
59627 readers
2911 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Everybody in the know, knows that x86 64 bit was held back to push Itanium, Intel was all about market segmentation, which is also why Celeron was amputated on for instance RAM compared to Pentium.
Market segmentation has a profit maximization motive. You are not allowed to use cheap parts for things that you are supposed to buy expensive parts for. Itanium was supposed to be the only viable CPU for servers, and keeping x86 32 bit was part of that strategy.
That AMD was successful with 64 bit, and Itanium failed was Karma as deserved for Intel.
Today it's obvious how moronic Intel's policy back then was, because even phones got 64 bit CPU's too back around 2009.
32 bits is simply too much of a limitation for many even pretty trivial tasks. And modern X86 chips are in fact NOT 64 bit anymore, but hybrids that handle tasks with 256 bits routinely, and some even with 512 bits, with instruction extensions that have become standard on both Intel and AMD
When AMD came with Ryzen Threadripper and Epyc, and prices scaled very proportionally to performance, and none were artificially hampered, it was such a nice breath of fresh air.
It was also a big surprise when Intel just gave up. The industry was getting settled in for a David v Goliath battle, and then Goliath said this David kid was right.
Yes, I absolutely thought Intel would make their own, and AMD would lose the fight.
But maybe Intel couldn't do that, because AMD had patented it already, and whatever Intel did, it could be called a copy of that.
Anyways it's great to see AMD finally is doing well and finally is profitable. I just never expected Intel to fail as badly as they are? So unless they fight their way to profitability again, we may be in the same boat again as we were when Intel was solo on X86?
But then again, maybe x86 is becoming obsolete, as Arm is getting ever more competitive.
Right, I think the future isn't Intel v AMD, it's AMD v ARM v RISC-V. Might be hard to break into the desktop and laptop space, but Linux servers don't have the same backwards compatibility issues with x86. That's a huge market.
Intel as a company isn't going anywhere any time soon; they're just too big, with too many resources, not to do at least OK.
They have serious challenges in their approach and performance to engineering, but short of merging with someone else they'll find their niche. For as long as x86-derived architectures remain current (i.e. if AMD is still chugging along with them) they'll continue to put out their own chips, and occasionally they'll manage to get an edge.
The real question would be what happens if x86 finally ceases to be viable. In theory there's nothing stopping Intel (or AMD) pivoting to ARM or RISC-V (or fucking POWER for that matter) if that's where the market goes. Losing the patent/licensing edge would sting, though.