When we think of Intel we tend to think about it as being one of the most successful
CPU manufacturers there is it's CPU architecture being the core of the pc, but Intel has made some
mistakes like the floating point bug in the very first Pentiums which recent security problems like
meltdown and spectre of Intel's other mistakes can hold a candle to this one however no failures cost
Intel so much have been so public at the time and luckily for Intel so well forgotten by the wider
public. Even though they're still living with the consequences of this mistake for at least another
year or two yep i'm talking about the Itanium if you're around at the time you remember all the
hype about titanium about how powerful it was going to be i was going to become the next pc
architecture then you would have got to see just how fast it failed and how quickly it got the
nickname itanic and then apparently was gone you may have wondered how a hugely successful company
like Intel got it quite so wrong well stick around it's time to have a look at the itanic history of
the itanium. The history of itanium starts not with Intel but with these guys hp at this point
in time hp not only made pcs but he also made high-end unix workstations and eye-wateringly
expensive enterprise systems as well CPU that powered these systems was hp's risc pa
which hp had been developing for quite a while but hp were fast approaching what they thought
would be the limit for risk va and that was being able to run one CPU instruction per clock cycle
so HP were looking to try and get more out of a CPU and the idea they had was epic
by that i don't mean that it was great i mean that it was explicitly parallel instruction computing
yeah epic for short the idea behind epic was the compiler could work out which instructions in
the program could be run at the same time as each other he could then at compile time bundle up all
the operations that could be run at once into one epic instruction when it came time to execute the
program the CPU would take each epic instruction and run all the sub-instructions at the same time
in theory this meant it could greatly increase the amount of work the CPU could do with each
clock cycle this would also get rid of all the complex hardware in a CPU that has to deal with
optimizing CPU instructions in the pipeline like branch predicting and stuff like that
this could now all be made the compiler's problem which the hardware engineers saw as a win-win
the only problem hp saw with this was damn expensive to develop a new cpu architecture
but hp had a good working relationship with intel as unlike most other vendors in this space
they were making quite a lot of money from pc sales so a deal was struck with intel hp would
move its unix os hp ux from risk ba to this new cpu architecture meaning lots of high-end system
sales and intel well they would develop the cpu and be able to sell it to other customers as well
everyone's a winner or at least so they thought the only big thing hp wanted from intel was a
guaranteed road map for future cpu developments after all unix systems were hp's cache cam
so they were going to need to depend on intel for the cpu they needed to guarantee that intel was
going to keep developing it and like that bit in fairy tales where you all think why did you agree
to that intel agreed to that i mean they thought they were going to make money out of this thing
and it would in no way come back to bite them in the ass yep it wouldn't matter
how many times intel yelled rumpelstiltskin they were stuck with developing this thing
until we're really keen on developing this thing because at this point in time intel was shut out
of the high-end market sure the pc was doing really well but the high-end expensive stuff
well that was all seven up by hp with its risk pa deck with its fax platform sun had spark and sgi
with mips and ibm even had its power architecture so intel getting into the market replacing risk pa
big money to intel development of titanium took a while but this worked out well for intel
as the high-end market was changing fast first deck had run into some really big problems
its longest running line of machines the pdp range well that had finally come to an end and
its successful vac system well that was not problem free either the vax platform itself
had got pretty aged and the first attempt to replace the cpu prism well that being scrapped
its next replacement alpha well it was starting to do well but it cost an absolute fortune to develop
deck had lost way too much money and was purchased by compaq which at the time was a fairly big shock
as deck had been the second largest company in the market second only to ibm they just got purchased
by a pc manufacturer however compact was soon in trouble and looking to cut costs so it decided it
would drop the development of the deck alpha and move titanium for all its big systems and also
shift vax's os vms from alpha to titanium sgi also changed managing director about this point in time
someone had been involved in the pc market and so he decided that he'd move to titanium the idea
being that this would reduce sgi's development costs you'd no longer have to spend on mips that
decision would prove to be fatal for sgi in the end if you want to know more about that
you can see my video i've done on sgi i'll put a link in the description below son unlike the
others decided it would hold back and it would keep working on its ultra spark architecture
but it did announce that it would put solaris to titanium which in the end it never actually
did even the big unix vendors for the pc platform got behind titanium with project monterey project
monterey brought together all the big unix vendors of the time seo sequence ibm to work on one unix
variant for titanium now this version never actually did get to the point of being released
and the fallout from that led to seo suing ibm when it started to contribute code to the linux
kernel deck now owned by compact renamed digital unix to true64 and announced it would be moving to
titanium which of course never happened because compact went bust and then got bought by hp
unsurprisingly microsoft would also port windows nt to titanium as well
so business-wise titanium was going well it had become an extinction-level event for most cpu
architectures killing off both risk pa and alpha and well more or less killing off mips as well
then intel released the first version of the titanium cpu to developers and well this is where
it all changes the performance of it was well awful in windows nt it was worse than current
x66 cpus linux was the first os to get running on titanium thanks to the efforts of project trillian
but again its performance just well disappointing big part of the problem was compilers until
they've been working on their own compiler to help make epic instructions a success but well it
turned out to be much harder than intel expected with most compilco being unable to fill an epic
instruction the open source compiler gcc did a much better job of getting it done than intel's
own one did but it was still far from great the underlying performance of the cpu was also not
that great either intel released a second version which was meant for mass production and it was
you know better but it was still nowhere near what was needed interesting titanium started to dry up
and projects to port solaris and monterey quietly shutting down however windows nt was released for
it and linux hp ux sgi xyrix and of course vms the os from the vax system with vitanium floundering
no one was talking about it as the future of pcs anymore in fact it felt like titanium was
in limbo and then came the hammer blow from amd yep amd produced amd 64 a 64-bit version
of the xx6 instruction set and unfortunately for intel yeah that thing performed performed really
well running 32-bit code it performed really well running 64-bit code something that the itunes well
couldn't do yep suddenly amd would become the future of the pc and titanium just just wouldn't
be server vendors sun and ibm soon started amd 64 offerings and they were selling well as they could
run 32-bit code much faster than titanium and you know a little bit better than intel's own x86
chips and of course they could run 64-bit code this was intel's worst nightmare amd was still
squeezing at the low end of the market it looked like they could wipe them out in the high end
so when the pressure from microsoft he wanted to drop titanium with their market share at
risk from amd until agreed to license amd 64's instruction set with everyone agreeing to call
it x8664 from now on this whole thing had been a financial disaster for intel i'll show you the
now infamous graph of intel's expected earnings from titanium and of course it's actual earnings
yikes it's at this point in time that everyone assumed titanium was dead and everyone had just
stopped talking about it however if remember that deal with hp back cursed fairy tale deal
well that meant as long as hp kept buying cpus into that to keep to the road map so for the
last 20 years intel has had to keep paying to develop titanium still had to keep making them
and will do for a year or two more it's only this year that linus toval announced that linux will
be dropping support for it so you may be wondering what this zombie architecture's been doing for the
last 20 years the answer is running expensive hp servers yep it's still being used to run vms which
finally got ported to x86_64 only in the last year or two and of course it's still running hp
ux as well this is the part of the video where i'd normally start showing you around some bitter kit
but not this time you'd still buy a titanium server second hand but well there's still over
a grand and that's far too much to spend on what would essentially just be a prop for one video
more or less anything i could show you running on titanium would be well more fun to show you
running on another piece of kit wanna see vms running well that's more interesting than alpha
want to see hp ux running well again it's far more iconic on risk pa if you want to see irix yeah
you're going to want to see that on a real mixed bit of sgi kit titanium's just not a fun platform
and most titanium servers are huge and well who wants to use that much storage space on titanium i
mean i can fit a few more amigas in that space or an sdi box or two hell even a sun server so that's
more or less it for titanium except for to mention the one bit of the former future pc that made it
into the actual pc when intel were creating titanium they needed the new boot firmware
as the pcs bias was riddled with limitations from 80s computers so they created efi to boot titanium
machines years later when they were trying to modernize the pc intel brought efi back and put
a u in front of it giving us uefi the firmware used by most pcs to boot today well when it's not
just running in bios emulation mode that is if you made it to the end i hope you found today's
journey through intel's most costly mistake today interesting if you think others will be
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