It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but, hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this is going to be a flop from the earliest days.
an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar
Aside from it not being 64bit initially uh.. did we live through the same time period? The Athlons completely blew the Intel competition out of the water. If Intel hadn't heavily engaged in market manipulation, AMD would have taken a huge bite out of their marketshare.
In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the fairly late 2000s. Yes, Intel apparently played a bunch of dirty pool but that was mostly about the desktop at the time which the big suppliers didn't really care about.
But initial Opteron success was pretty much unrelated to 64-bit. As a very senior Intel exec told me at the time, Intel held back on multi-core because their key software partner was extremely nervous about being forced to support a multi-core world.
I'm well aware of Opteron's impact. In fact, the event when that info was related to me, was partly held for me to scare the hell out of Intel sales folks. But 64-bit wasn't really part of the equation. Long time ago and not really disposed to dig into timelines. But multi-core was an issue for Intel before they were forced to respond with Yamhill to AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86.
> As a very senior Intel exec told me at the time, Intel held back on multi-core because their key software partner was extremely nervous about being forced to support a multi-core world.
That's one way to explain it. Alternatively, one might say that FSB-based Netburst servers would not benefit much from multi-core because the architecture (and especially FSB) has hit its limitation. Arguably, Intel had no competitive product on the mass server market until 2006 and Core-based Xeon 5100 introduction. Only enormous market inertia has kept them afloat.
> In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the fairly late 2000s.
That was one relatively small (servers number-wise) segment of the market. Introduction of Opteron servers and Windows Server 2003 64-bit has created a new segment of mass 64-bit servers which have very quickly taken over entire 32-bit (at that time) mass server market. That was the real market that Intel wanted for themselves with introduction of proprietary Itanium but failed to acquire it because of the compatibility issue. High-end mainframe-adjacent market segment indeed belonged to Itanium for many years after, but that wasn't the goal of Itanium. Intel wanted to be a monopoly on the entire PC&server market with no cross-licensing agreements but failed and had to cross-license AMD64 instead.
It’s understandable why companies try and sometimes succeed at creating a reality distortion field about the future success of their products. Management is asking Wall Street to allow them to make this huge investment (in their own salaries and R&D empire), and they need to promise a corresponding huge return. Wall Street always opportunities to jack up profits in the short term, and management needs to tell a compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting. Intel also wanted to encourage adoption by OEMs and software companies, and making them think that they need to support Itanium soon could have been a necessary condition to make that a reality.
I don’t know what factors would make IEA underestimate solar adoption.
> I don’t know what factors would make IEA underestimate solar adoption.
The IEA is an energy industry group from back in the days where "energy" primarily meant fossil fuels (i.e. the 1970s), and they've never entirely gotten away from that mentality.
There are trillions of dollars on the line in convincing people not to buy solar panels or other renewable sources.
Remember all the conspiracy theories about how someone invented a free energy machine and the government had to cover it up? Well they're actually true - with the caveat that the free energy machine only works in direct sunlight.
How often are they reality distortion fields vs leadership trying to put on a face to rally the troops and investors? How do you do the second without the first?
Something I ponder from time to time, while trying to figure out how to be less of a cynic and more of a leader.
> Management is asking Wall Street to allow them to make this huge investment (in their own salaries and R&D empire), and they need to promise a corresponding huge return. Wall Street always opportunities to jack up profits in the short term, and management needs to tell a compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting
Explain Amazon, Uber, Spotify, Tesla, and other publicly listed businesses that had low or even negative profit margins for many years.
The idea that Wall Street only rewards short term profit margins is laughable considering who is at the top of the market cap rankings.
one thing I found amazing about the IEA chart is how similar the colors of each year was making it very difficult to see which year was which. the gist of the chart was still clear though
