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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: is Vax addressing sane today
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2024 00:56:01 -0000 (UTC)
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On Thu, 3 Oct 2024 23:49 +0100 (BST), John Dallman wrote:

> Another contributing factor was Itanium, which was quite successful at
> disrupting the development cycles of the RISC architectures. Of the five
> that I worked with [that all failed, except one] ...

That’s a pretty depressing list. ;) Except

> IBM kept POWER development going through the Itanium period, which is a
> significant reason why it's still going.

Given all of IBM’s missteps, it’s mildly surprising they got that one 
right. Even a stopped clock is right once a day ...

> SGI went into Itanium hard and neglected MIPS development, which never
> recovered. It had been losing in the performance race anyway.

SGI decided to embrace the platform that was eating their market, and try 
to sell Windows NT boxes. Trouble is, those NT boxes, while only a 
fraction of the cost of an IRIX-based product, still cost about 3× what 
other NT machines were going for.

> Sun kept SPARC development going, but made a different mistake, by
> spreading their development resources over too many projects. The ones
> that succeeded did so too slowly, and they fell behind. Also, Linux ate
> their web-infrastructure market rather quickly.

They could still have sold SPARC hardware running Linux. I can remember 
comments saying Linux ran better on that hardware than Sun’s own SunOS/
Solaris did.

> Linux could not have had the success it did without the large range of
> powerful and cheap hardware designed to run Windows.

Linux succeeded by not having all its eggs in one basket. It ran on 
everything.

Which is why it is now running rings around Windows, as Microsoft 
struggles to dig itself out of the x86 dead-end niche.