most computer enthusiasts know Intel for their famous x86 CPU architecture that
powers most of today's desktops and laptops
but did you know that not so long ago team blue actually tried to kill off x86
entirely if you're not sure what i'm talking about maybe the name itanium
will ring a bell huh probably not for a lot of you this was
an all-new architecture and CPU brand from Intel that made its debut back in
2001 and was billed as being so efficient that it would just naturally
come to dominate the market at some point but these days you can barely even
buy an itanium CPU anymore so
what was the big idea let's start as we always do with a little bit of history
back in the 1990s hewlett-packard was looking at ways to make cpus more
parallel but instead of sticking more cores onto a CPU or using hyper
threading hp wanted to simplify the architecture by having software
determine what order to execute instructions in instead of having the
CPU do the heavy lifting and hardware the hope was that this would free up
processing resources to execute more instructions in parallel ultimately
making for a more powerful energy efficient CPU hp took their new
architecture which was called epic no not that one to Intel which then helped
develop it further into ia64 the architecture used in titanium titanium
was also Intel's first attempt at a 64-bit processor and actually hit the
market before AMD's first 64-bit CPU
opteron which released in 2003. hp and
Intel felt confident that titanium would become popular in the server and
workstation settings and go on to overtake x86 and home pcs as well
there was even a version of Windows specifically written for titanium's
architecture so why did it flop so badly we'll tell you right after this message
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find your perfect toolkit today so it turns out that trying to determine what
instructions the CPU should run in software is a lot trickier than hp
and Intel thought it would be typically the CPU has a specialized group of
circuits called a scheduler that determines what order to run instructions the scheduler can make
these decisions much more effectively than software can since the scheduler
can make adjustments based on when exactly the CPU is trying to access the
memory this can't be done effectively in software since you can't figure out when
the CPU is accessing memory ahead of time and because the software would
pre-schedule instructions titanium cpus suffer from stalls quite frequently
slowing them down there was also the issue that even though titanium's
architecture was intended to be the way of the future
Intel still had to do business in the present and the vast majority of
software for servers and workstations was written for x86 or other non-itanium
architectures running these programs on titanium meant that they had to be
emulated which introduced a huge amount of performance overhead and to make
matters even worse for titanium the aforementioned opteron from AMD was
released two years later although optron was also 64-bit it used the
x-8664 instruction set the same one that powers the chips that's probably sitting
in your home pc right now and as the name implies it's natively compatible
with x86 since it was essentially built on top of it so the folks running x86
based servers and workstations had a far easier time upgrading to operon instead
of titanium for their 64-bit fix making
team red's offering much more popular Intel quickly
realizing that titanium wasn't going to catch on instead implemented x8664 into
their own xeon lineup of server processors which went on to become very
successful so Intel actually let xeon cannibalize the titanium lineup to a
large extent and titanium became relegated to niche markets only Intel
did actually keep developing new models of titanium chips until 2017 but despite
the fact it hung on for quite a while it never made up more than a small fraction
of Intel's CPU sales so what's the lesson here if you're
trying to reinvent the wheel make sure you have a car to stick that wheel on or
at least like a tricycle
we're not really good at metaphors anyways thanks for watching guys if you
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