wrote:No question, it has added value for them as they can potentially trim their driver development and support costs. Whether it has added value for customers is undetermined.
Again, you don't get my point.
If it will drive customers to more backward-compatible alternatives, then it's commercial suicide. So the IHVs have evaluated this step, and concluded that it is not commercial suicide.
wrote:Again, you don't get my point.
If it will drive customers to more backward-compatible alternatives, then it's commercial suicide. So the IHVs have evaluated this step, and concluded that it is not commercial suicide.
They might see less push for backwards compatibility in their crystal ball, especially in these days of Chrome devices, Android, and iOS. Intel has made this calculation poorly in the past, so I guess I don't have as much faith as you.
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
wrote:Intel has made this calculation poorly in the past, so I guess I don't have as much faith as you.
How exactly has Intel made a poor decision? I've not exactly seen a mass exodus from Intel-based products to alternatives.
On the contrary, Intel has pushed virtually every competitor out of the market over the years.
IA64 and the RAMBUS saga, two prime examples. Unlike many other companies, Intel had enough runway to recover.
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
wrote:IA64 and the RAMBUS saga, two prime examples. Unlike many other companies, Intel had enough runway to recover.
IA64 was an option, Intel never stopped making the x86 processors that the market demanded. Most of Intel's efforts were still concentrated on x86.
As for RAMBUS... that doesn't make sense. Any new memory technology will be incompatible with the previous. So I don't see how this fits in the context of backward compatibility.
Even so, RAMBUS was an option. Intel never stopped supporting SDR. They were contractually forbidden to sell DDR-based systems by RAMBUS, but as soon as that contract ran out, Intel already *had* DDR chips in production. Namely, they had designed their chipsets to be both SDR and DDR-compatible.
So if anything, it proves that Intel did indeed think about this very well, and didn't put their eggs in one basket.
wrote:IA64 was an option, Intel never stopped making the x86 processors that the market demanded. Most of Intel's efforts were still c […]
wrote:IA64 and the RAMBUS saga, two prime examples. Unlike many other companies, Intel had enough runway to recover.
IA64 was an option, Intel never stopped making the x86 processors that the market demanded. Most of Intel's efforts were still concentrated on x86.
As for RAMBUS... that doesn't make sense. Any new memory technology will be incompatible with the previous. So I don't see how this fits in the context of backward compatibility.
Even so, RAMBUS was an option. Intel never stopped supporting SDR. They were contractually forbidden to sell DDR-based systems by RAMBUS, but as soon as that contract ran out, Intel already *had* DDR chips in production. Namely, they had designed their chipsets to be both SDR and DDR-compatible.
So if anything, it proves that Intel did indeed think about this very well, and didn't put their eggs in one basket.
Man you have rose colored glasses on. Intel tried force migrate everyone to ia64 and rambus, they failed. Other poor Intel handling was the fpu bug, compiler rigging, and piv was a misstep as well.
wrote:IA64 was an option, Intel never stopped making the x86 processors that the market demanded. Most of Intel's efforts were still concentrated on x86.
IA64 failed on two counts. It failed to supplant competitor hardware in the high end enterprise arena with both SPARC and POWER higher in market share. It also failed in that it wasn't usable in the consumer space when the market began requiring something beyond x86.
wrote:As for RAMBUS... that doesn't make sense. Any new memory technology will be incompatible with the previous. So I don't see how this fits in the context of backward compatibility.
Even so, RAMBUS was an option. Intel never stopped supporting SDR. They were contractually forbidden to sell DDR-based systems by RAMBUS, but as soon as that contract ran out, Intel already *had* DDR chips in production. Namely, they had designed their chipsets to be both SDR and DDR-compatible.
So if anything, it proves that Intel did indeed think about this very well, and didn't put their eggs in one basket.
Intel offered no mid or high-end consumer platforms for about a year without requiring investment in RAMBUS hardware. i810 was inappropriate for anything but low end. The MTH was supposed to work around this, but of course it didn't turn out all that well.
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
wrote:Even so, RAMBUS was an option. Intel never stopped supporting SDR.
That is not true.
The i850 came out in 2000 and the i845 not until 2002 so for the first 2 years of production their Flagship P4 had no DDR or SDR support through Intel.
wrote:They were contractually forbidden to sell DDR-based systems by RAMBUS,
If that's true then CLEARLY Intel was making poor decisions by contractually putting all their eggs in one basket.
And if not true then they were making poor decisions by voluntarily putting all their eggs in one basket.
Additionally during this time they were suppressing P3 Tualatin (which was concurrent with early P4 and a better processor) by limiting their i810/i815 chipsets to 512Mb of RAM.
Another poor decision.
Further back, Intel abandoned socket 7 at 233 MHz and went to slot processors claiming that socket 7 (and socket processors in general) had no more room for growth due to technical limitations.
AMD had no trouble more than doubling the 233MHz.
.
GRUMPY OLD FART - On Hiatus, sort'a
Mann-Made Global Warming. - We should be more concerned about the Intellectual Climate.
You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life, but if he can't handle sushi you must also teach him to cook.
Whatever, clearly RAMBUS completely ruled at the time, and was the obvious choice for high-end systems.
As for slot processors, the obvious reason was that Intel wanted to put large amounts of L2 cache close to the CPU. The Pentium Pro with 1 MB L2 cache proved to be prohibitively expensive to manufacture, hence the introduction of the Pentium II in slot-form, where cache-chips could be put onto a PCB together with the CPU.
Clearly technical limitations.
AMD also went to its own slot processor system for the first generation of Athlons.
wrote:Man you have rose colored glasses on.
No need to get personal.
Besides, as a 6502/68000/PPC guy, I find people claiming I am pro-Intel to be hilarious. Get a clue. x86 is rubbish.
wrote:Intel tried force migrate everyone to ia64 and rambus, they failed.
Firstly, they didn't try fo 'forge migrate' everyone. As I already said, their main focus has always been x86.
Secondly, migrating to IA64 would actually have been a good thing, rather than this pathetic x86-64 abomination we are currently locked-in to.
Lastly, as I said, RAMBUS was the obvious choice at the time.
1) DDR didn't arrive until later
2) DDR had more stability issues at high clockspeeds
3) DDR did not deliver as much bandwidth as RAMBUS did.
So it was obviously the technology to go with. The only thing that made it a relatively bad choice was that the RAMBUS company was scum, and had rather extreme demands and inflated prices.
Console builders also went for RAMBUS at the time.
wrote:Other poor Intel handling was the fpu bug, compiler rigging, and piv was a misstep as well.
Okay, this is just crackpot territory. Not even worthy of a serious answer.
wrote:It also failed in that it wasn't usable in the consumer space when the market began requiring something beyond x86.
It didn't fail, it never even tried to get into the consumer space. All IA64-based processors were aimed at workstation/server markets, and as such were too costly for consumer-oriented products.
The same could be said for pretty much every x86 CPU at its introduction. 386, 486, Pentium, etc... They were all expensive at introduction, and aimed mainly at workstation/server markets. Over time, cut-down versions would be introduced and/or advances in manufacturing combined with large volumes would bring down prices to a fraction.
Intel could have marketed IA64 towards customers, but the opportunity never arose, so they never offered any downsized IA64 CPUs. Only CPUs with huge amounts of cache, which obviously inflated the price by a huge factor.
wrote:Whatever, clearly RAMBUS completely ruled at the time, and was the obvious choice for high-end systems.
I wouldn't say it completely rules at the time...even Intel tried to back away from RDRAM even before the RDRAM i820 chipset was even released by adding back support for SDRAM (this didn't end well).
wrote:It didn't fail, it never even tried to get into the consumer space. All IA64-based processors were aimed at workstation/server m […]
wrote:It also failed in that it wasn't usable in the consumer space when the market began requiring something beyond x86.
It didn't fail, it never even tried to get into the consumer space. All IA64-based processors were aimed at workstation/server markets, and as such were too costly for consumer-oriented products.
The same could be said for pretty much every x86 CPU at its introduction. 386, 486, Pentium, etc... They were all expensive at introduction, and aimed mainly at workstation/server markets. Over time, cut-down versions would be introduced and/or advances in manufacturing combined with large volumes would bring down prices to a fraction.
Intel could have marketed IA64 towards customers, but the opportunity never arose, so they never offered any downsized IA64 CPUs. Only CPUs with huge amounts of cache, which obviously inflated the price by a huge factor.
i820 wasn't consumer? So Intel wanted to leave the consumer market to AMD?
Wasn't DDR DIMM released a bit after RDRAM RIMM? And wouldn't that have meant Rambus memory had the chance to mature and lower prices while DDR still wasn't being sold?
And what actually is your definition of "consumer" and "high end" here?
I hope you're joking btw, you're clearly being clouded here
wrote:i820 wasn't consumer? So Intel wanted to leave the consumer market to AMD?
I'm talking about IA64 there, not about chipsets or memory technologies.
wrote:wrote:i820 wasn't consumer? So Intel wanted to leave the consumer market to AMD?
I'm talking about IA64 there, not about chipsets or memory technologies.
You mean this?:
wrote:Whatever, clearly RAMBUS completely ruled at the time, and was the obvious choice for high-end systems.
So I guess you think RAMBUS isn't memory then and you think chipsets have nothing to do with memory? I'm sorry, but you're just being silly here 😀
wrote:Okay, this is just crackpot territory.
Don't be so hard on yourself.
Threads about Microsoft, Intel or both have with time a 100% probablity of ending up in hilarious offtopic discussions.
Im just going to namedrop Netburst, Vista, Atom and Clippy to see if things get even better! 😀
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.
wrote:Threads about Microsoft, Intel or both have with time a 100% probablity of ending up in hilarious offtopic discussions.
Im just going to namedrop Netburst, Vista, Atom and Clippy to see if things get even better! 😀
In scali world, those are the bestest ever.
wrote:So I guess you think RAMBUS isn't memory then and you think chipsets have nothing to do with memory? I'm sorry, but you're just being silly here 😀
Clearly you were commenting on what I said about IA64 earlier, about how it was never consumer-oriented.
Now you are mixing it up with RAMBUS. You make no sense.
Looks like another largely inconsequential decision.
They're probably getting their user base (*bleating noise*) ready for something they'll be deploying in the near future, flattening out the differences for development cost's sake. Question is, what exactly? more seamless NSA integration? quite frankly this is akin to complaining about cancer not striking children as oft.
