[popopo73]

They got incredibly lucky with IBM choosing the 386 for the PC platform and have been riding that wave ever since.

Itanium was a flop from bad business decisions IIRC. Note too that x86-64 was developed by AMD, and Intel licensed it from them.

[aidenn0]

> They got incredibly lucky with IBM choosing the 386 for the PC platform...

1. IBM picked the 8088 for the PC platform. This was part luck, part Motorola being too slow to market with the 68k.

2. The first PC with an 80386 was made by Compaq, not IBM.

3. A big part of what held OS/2 1.x back was IBM insisting on it working with the 80286, which made properly supporting DOS programs challenging. OS/2 2.0 came out 6 years after the first 386 based machine from Compaq.

[rbanffy]

> Motorola being too slow to market with the 68k.

Also Texas didn’t have a second source for the TMS9900.

We definitely live in the worst possible timeline.

[popopo73]

Thank you for the clarification!

[bsder]

> Itanium was a flop from bad business decisions IIRC.

Itanium was a flop from a technical standpoint but not from a business one. Intel spent roughly a gigabuck and effectively scared every competitor out the pool except for IBM and AMD.

Intel is suffering because their old fab folks all retired, and no young, smart engineer over the last 20 years wanted to work for any semiconductor company let alone Intel.

[jabl]

> Itanium was a flop from a technical standpoint but not from a business one. Intel spent roughly a gigabuck and effectively scared every competitor out the pool except for IBM and AMD.

Even without the Itanium, the economies of scale in the x86(-64) world would have driven the RISC vendors out of the game.

[osnium123]

Their old fabs folks were let go in prior layoffs and the quality of people pursing degrees in semiconductors has been dropping over time