Lack of competition results in complacency and stagnation.
This is absolutely true, but it wasn’t the case regarding 64 bit x86. It was a very bad miscalculation, where Intel wanted bigger more profitable server marketshare.
So Intel was extremely busy with profit maximization, so they wanted to sell Itanium for servers, and keep the x86 for personal computers.
The result was of course that X86 32 bit couldn’t compete when AMD made it 64bit, and Itanium failed despite HP-Compaq killing the worlds fastest CPU at the time the DEC Alpha, because they wanted to jump on Itanium instead. But the Itanium frankly was an awful CPU based on an idea they couldn’t get to work properly.
This was not complacency, and it was not stagnation in the way that Intel made actually real new products and tried to be innovative, but with the problem that the product sucked and was too expensive for what it offered.
Why the Alpha was never brought back, I don’t understand? As mentioned it was AFAIK the worlds fastest CPU when it was discontinued?
This is absolutely true, but it wasn’t the case regarding 64 bit x86. It was a very bad miscalculation, where Intel wanted bigger more profitable server marketshare.
So Intel was extremely busy with profit maximization, so they wanted to sell Itanium for servers, and keep the x86 for personal computers.
The result was of course that X86 32 bit couldn’t compete when AMD made it 64bit, and Itanium failed despite HP-Compaq killing the worlds fastest CPU at the time the DEC Alpha, because they wanted to jump on Itanium instead. But the Itanium frankly was an awful CPU based on an idea they couldn’t get to work properly.
This was not complacency, and it was not stagnation in the way that Intel made actually real new products and tried to be innovative, but with the problem that the product sucked and was too expensive for what it offered.
Why the Alpha was never brought back, I don’t understand? As mentioned it was AFAIK the worlds fastest CPU when it was discontinued?