{"slug": "curious-why-there-are-so-many-fortran-compilers", "title": "Curious why there are so many FORTRAN compilers", "summary": "A commentator reflects on the failure of Intel i860 chips despite their technical potential, attributing it to major computer companies prioritizing profits over performance, and draws a parallel to current AI data center investments.", "body_md": "I thought the intel i860 chips had great potential. Each one was capable of 40 MFLOPS, they were cheap enough to put in PCs, and capable enough to configure as massively parallel supercomputers, and everything in between. I never understood at the time why they failed at gaining marketshare. In hindsight, I think it was because the major computer companies at the time (DEC, Sun, Cray) started playing Monopoly, which led to the dot com bust in the late 1990s. The successful ES 10000 you mention eventually did not have the i860 chips, it was built around the arguably less capable Sun sparc chip, a business decision for profits rather than a technical decision to benefit their customers. I worry that something similar is happening now with AI based data centers driving both stock market investments and computer hardware.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/curious-why-there-are-so-many-fortran-compilers", "canonical_source": "https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/curious-why-there-are-so-many-fortran-compilers/11001?page=2#post_35", "published_at": "2026-07-15 18:09:09+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-15 18:16:42.811033+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Intel", "i860", "DEC", "Sun", "Cray", "ES 10000", "Sun Sparc"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/curious-why-there-are-so-many-fortran-compilers", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/curious-why-there-are-so-many-fortran-compilers.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/curious-why-there-are-so-many-fortran-compilers.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/curious-why-there-are-so-many-fortran-compilers.jsonld"}}