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most computer enthusiasts know Intel for their famous x86 CPU architecture that

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powers most of today's desktops and laptops

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but did you know that not so long ago team blue actually tried to kill off x86

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entirely if you're not sure what i'm talking about maybe the name itanium

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will ring a bell huh probably not for a lot of you this was

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an all-new architecture and CPU brand from Intel that made its debut back in

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2001 and was billed as being so efficient that it would just naturally

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come to dominate the market at some point but these days you can barely even

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buy an itanium CPU anymore so

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what was the big idea let's start as we always do with a little bit of history

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back in the 1990s hewlett-packard was looking at ways to make cpus more

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parallel but instead of sticking more cores onto a CPU or using hyper

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threading hp wanted to simplify the architecture by having software

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determine what order to execute instructions in instead of having the

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CPU do the heavy lifting and hardware the hope was that this would free up

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processing resources to execute more instructions in parallel ultimately

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making for a more powerful energy efficient CPU hp took their new

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architecture which was called epic no not that one to Intel which then helped

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develop it further into ia64 the architecture used in titanium titanium

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was also Intel's first attempt at a 64-bit processor and actually hit the

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market before AMD's first 64-bit CPU

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opteron which released in 2003. hp and

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Intel felt confident that titanium would become popular in the server and

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workstation settings and go on to overtake x86 and home pcs as well

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there was even a version of Windows specifically written for titanium's

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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

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instructions the CPU should run in software is a lot trickier than hp

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and Intel thought it would be typically the CPU has a specialized group of

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circuits called a scheduler that determines what order to run instructions the scheduler can make

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these decisions much more effectively than software can since the scheduler

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can make adjustments based on when exactly the CPU is trying to access the

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memory this can't be done effectively in software since you can't figure out when

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the CPU is accessing memory ahead of time and because the software would

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pre-schedule instructions titanium cpus suffer from stalls quite frequently

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slowing them down there was also the issue that even though titanium's

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architecture was intended to be the way of the future

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Intel still had to do business in the present and the vast majority of

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software for servers and workstations was written for x86 or other non-itanium

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architectures running these programs on titanium meant that they had to be

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emulated which introduced a huge amount of performance overhead and to make

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matters even worse for titanium the aforementioned opteron from AMD was

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released two years later although optron was also 64-bit it used the

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x-8664 instruction set the same one that powers the chips that's probably sitting

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in your home pc right now and as the name implies it's natively compatible

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with x86 since it was essentially built on top of it so the folks running x86

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based servers and workstations had a far easier time upgrading to operon instead

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of titanium for their 64-bit fix making

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team red's offering much more popular Intel quickly

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realizing that titanium wasn't going to catch on instead implemented x8664 into

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their own xeon lineup of server processors which went on to become very

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successful so Intel actually let xeon cannibalize the titanium lineup to a

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large extent and titanium became relegated to niche markets only Intel

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did actually keep developing new models of titanium chips until 2017 but despite

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the fact it hung on for quite a while it never made up more than a small fraction

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of Intel's CPU sales so what's the lesson here if you're

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trying to reinvent the wheel make sure you have a car to stick that wheel on or

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at least like a tricycle

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we're not really good at metaphors anyways thanks for watching guys if you

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like this video hit like hit subscribe and hit us up in the comment section

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with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future