On Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:39:10 -0400 Michael Stone <[email protected]> wrote:
... > On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 09:15:10AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote: > >Stefan Monnier <[email protected]> wrote: > >> The IA64 architecture was a resounding success in one area tho: it > >> killed most of the competition that was coming from "above" (at least > >> DEC's Alpha, SGI's MIPS, HP's PA, and it likely sped up the demise of > >> Sun's SPARC, I don't think it had much impact on POWER or PowerPC, > >> OTOH) and thus helped open up the server (and supercomputer) market > >> for Intel (and AMD). > > > >I think, IBM is big enough and old enough and established enough with > >POWER that a "young whippersnapper" like Intel is no real danger to them > >in their own enclosed Mainframe walled garden. I believe Apple moving > >away from PowerPC did more damage to IBMs aspirations in that market. > > IBM didn't want to just be a mainframe manufacturer, they really wanted > to amortize the costs for those CPUs against multiple product lines. > They actually made a good number of high end computing sales for a few > years by being the only player left standing, until amd64 just became > too compelling. They still have some very large deployments, but their > overall market share is not what they'd hoped for. Apparently POWER is having a bit of a resurgence lately due to its openness and non-x86ness: https://www.osnews.com/story/133093/review-blackbird-secure-desktop-a-fully-open-source-modern-power9-workstation-without-any-proprietary-code/ Of course, Raptor seems to be a tiny player, and it's hard to see how they'll get any traction since the pricing isn't very competitive, apparently at least in part due to the chicken-and-egg market share problem, but it's an exciting development to watch. Celejar
