Quote:
Originally Posted by Japo
Backwards compatibility was the one and only reason, weighting against a number of opposite considerations, that caused the industry to choose the AMD x64 architecture instead of the now extinct Itanium pushed by Intel. If the industry had been neutral towards backwards compatibility, not to mention if it had wanted to curtail it, the result would have been just the opposite.
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The fact that Intel always put priority on backwards compatibility was one of the main reasons that their architecture got the established industry standard.
In the end I can only say it was the right decision.... We maybe saw some better architectures, but they are dead now and that was finally worse for their users.
In my opinion this was very helpfull in the end as we now have a situation where most computers share a common architecture (and compatibility).
Of course they even kept backwards compatibility where it was completely ridiculous and nobody ever needed it (thinking about the famous A20-Gate...).