Perhaps the concept is not fine, but we should be careful to distinguish knowledge gained from hindsight vs. criticism of those who at least had the bravery to try.
So how many times do you have to fail before being brave is just a bad business decision. The "concept" wasn't fine for Multiflow or the i860 (I used both, and would call it terrible for the i860). It didn't work for Cydrome. Trimedia is gone. Transmeta flamed out. There's, what, a couple of DSP VLIW chips that are actually still sold?
But, hey, let's bet the company on Itanium and compilers that will be here Real Soon Now. I remember the development Merced boxes we got.
The general feeling at the time among people who had very relevant knowledge or experience was that compilers were close to being able to deal with something like Itanium sufficiently well.
That's revisionism. There was a general feeling we were getting good at building optimizing compilers, but I don't recall any consensus that VLIW was the way forward. The reaction to Itanium was much less than universally positive, and not just from the press.
> how many times do you have to fail before being brave is just a bad business decision
That's a very good question. More than once, certainly. How many times did Edison fail before he could produce a working light bulb? How many times did Shockley/Bardeen/Brattain fail before they could produce a working transistor? Even more relevantly,how many ENIAC-era computer projects failed before the idea really took off? Ditto for early consumer computers, mini-supers, etc. Several times at least in each case, sometimes many more. Sure, Multiflow and Cydrome failed. C6X was fairly successful. Transmeta was contemporaneous with Itanium and had other confounding features as well, so it doesn't count. There might have been a couple of others, but I'd say three or four or seven attempts before giving up is par for the course. What kind of scientist bases on a conclusion on so few experiments?
> The reaction to Itanium was much less than universally positive, and not just from the press.
Yes, the reaction after release was almost universal disappointment/contempt, but that's not relevant. That was after the "we can build smart enough compilers" prediction had already been proved false. During development of Itanium, based on the success of such an approach for various RISCs and C6X, people were still optimistic. You're the one being revisionist. It would be crazy to start building a VLIW processor now, but it really didn't seem so in the 90s. There were and always will be some competitors and habitual nay-sayers dumping on anything new, but that's not an honest portrayal of the contemporary zeitgeist.
So how many times do you have to fail before being brave is just a bad business decision. The "concept" wasn't fine for Multiflow or the i860 (I used both, and would call it terrible for the i860). It didn't work for Cydrome. Trimedia is gone. Transmeta flamed out. There's, what, a couple of DSP VLIW chips that are actually still sold?
But, hey, let's bet the company on Itanium and compilers that will be here Real Soon Now. I remember the development Merced boxes we got.
The general feeling at the time among people who had very relevant knowledge or experience was that compilers were close to being able to deal with something like Itanium sufficiently well.
That's revisionism. There was a general feeling we were getting good at building optimizing compilers, but I don't recall any consensus that VLIW was the way forward. The reaction to Itanium was much less than universally positive, and not just from the press.
Turns out they were wrong.
Very, very wrong. Again.