Re: is Vax addressing sane today

In article <2024Oct3.085754@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:

If the RISC companies failed to keep up, they only have themselves to
blame. It seems to me that a number of RISC companies had difficulties
with managing the larger projects that the growing die areas allowed.

Another contributing factor was Itanium, which was quite successful at
disrupting the development cycles of the RISC architectures. Of the five
that I worked with:

Alpha suffered from DEC's mis-management, which led to DEC being taken
over by Compaq. They killed Alpha when Itanium first became to work, and
before it was clear that it was a turkey.

PA-RISC was intended by HP to be replaced by Itanium. They managed that,
but their success was limited because Linux on x86-64 was so much more
cost-effective.

IBM kept POWER development going through the Itanium period, which is a
significant reason why it's still going.

SGI went into Itanium hard and neglected MIPS development, which never
recovered. It had been losing in the performance race anyway.

Sun kept SPARC development going, but made a different mistake, by
spreading their development resources over too many projects. The ones
that succeeded did so too slowly, and they fell behind. Also, Linux ate
their web-infrastructure market rather quickly.

Linux could not have had the success it did without the large range of
powerful and cheap hardware designed to run Windows.

John