Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Intel Tried To Kill x86! – Itanium Explained”.
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 from our sponsor, i fix it. I fix ifixit, wants to help you repair or upgrade everything from your cameras to your game consoles. Their pro tech kit has 64 bits and ifixit’s most popular opening tools all rolled up into one package. The kit also includes suction cups, tweezers anti-static, wrist, straps and more and everything is covered by ifix’s lifetime. Warranty go to ifixit.com techwiki and 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 like, this, video hit like hit, subscribe and hit us up in the comment section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future, .