C led to an atrophy of assembly muscles. Though this is mostly different.

A spec is NOT CODE.

Someone still needs to understand what the code means.

C optimizers are not the same as the radical departure of an LLM.

>C led to an atrophy of assembly muscles.

This is not true, though. Technically I don't do C but I used to do Assembly. Yet in Java code paths, to have a decent proof (and satisfactory results) of the optimizations made by JIT, PrintAssembly still works.

Assembly is not just the raw instructions that trigger microcode or knowing the latency of each one of them, or the (un)expected cache misses, it's the understanding the hardware, itself.

When it comes to Itanium all I can think of is how I wish I could have an Alpha. And how no one should care about Itanium.

It’s the product of companies bent on doing all the wrong things.

It took longer than necessary, but in what ways do you think an Intel Core-derived chip is different from what an “Intel Alpha” would have been?

Taking for granted that hardware backcompat (Itanium had this, too!) was a starting requirement…

Wasn't there a problem with Alpha, that it had too weak memory model or something? Think of atomic instructions with multi CPU system. Or do I remember something wrong?

Alpha was great but that wasn't enough against the convenience of just running an x86 box. It didn't find a niche quickly enough. ARM survived because they were low power. POWER survived because IBM is one big niche. MIPS died and reincarnated into RISC-V. I have no idea where Alpha would have gone had it not been dropped.

True. But it’s a technological representation of all that’s wrong with the industry.

Absolutely. This monstrosity managed to have all what was wrong with CISC and all of the disadvantages of RISC at a higher price point than anything on the market at the time.