Re: Did itanium fail?
Leading Chip fabs were all in-house in the 90s and heading into 2000 had topped the $1b per fab per generation. Outside of Intel/HP/Sun/IBM, no one could afford that level of investment.
SGI/DEC were already struggling for money and didn’t have realistic prospects of building their own fabs or getting others to adopt their designs. The dotCom boom let Sun continue but DEC was brought by Compaq who didn’t want to build fabs and who subsequently merged with HP. Intel and HP had already committed to Itanium in some form and the went with it. When the dotCom bubble burst, the path to smaller process nodes was unclear leaving no clear path for memory and CPU improvements, and everyone was hitting frequency scaling limits, Itanium looked like a promising option, albeit a little delayed.
Then we had a wave of innovative changes with memory frequency improvements, improvements in fabs offering another 4+ generations of process shrinks and AMDs 64-bit extensions changing how x86 was viewed in the Enterprise.
As for ARM eating x86s lunch, look at the profit margins on x86 at the budget end of the x86 market. It’s in the order of 100%, with top of the line Xeons making ten or more times that ARMs top margin products are in the 33%-50% range, and the volume products are closer to 10%. They both make money, but Intels model is significantly more profitable and likely to remain so for at least a few more generations.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
