Comment by acdha

I’m curious what kind of code his 30 lines were - I’m betting something FP-heavy based on the public focus benchmarks gave thst over branchy business logic. I still remember getting the pitch that you had to buy Intel’s compilers to get decent performance. I worked at a software vendor and later a computational research lab, and both times that torpedoed any interest in buying hardware because it boiled down to paying a couple of times more upfront and hoping you could optimize at least the equivalent gain back … or just buy an off-the-shelf system which performed well now and do literally anything else with your life.

One really interesting related angle is the rise of open source software in business IT which was happening contemporaneously. X86 compatibility mattered so much back then because people had tons of code they couldn’t easily modify whereas later switches like Apple’s PPC-x86 or x86-ARM and Microsoft’s recent ARM attempts seem to be a lot smoother because almost everyone is relying on many of the same open source libraries and compilers. I think Itanium would still have struggled to realize much of its peak performance but at least you wouldn’t have had so many frictional costs simply getting code to run correctly.