[HN Gopher] Itanium: Mark Architecture as Orphaned
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Itanium: Mark Architecture as Orphaned
Author : cglong
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-02-01 19:36 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (git.kernel.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (git.kernel.org)
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Yes. Die, trash, die!
| Koshkin wrote:
| The king is dead, long live the king!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeraScale_(microarchitecture)
| barkingcat wrote:
| This architecture accelerated Intel's downward spiral. It should
| have been shut down years ago, and I find it surprising in the
| changelog that Intel "is still officially shipping chips until
| July 29, 2021" no wonder Intel is behind on innovation.
|
| They should have closed out the team working on this long long
| ago and changed everyone working on this to making their newer
| chips work better.
| mprovost wrote:
| When they say "still shipping" I imagine a box in a warehouse
| somewhere full of new old stock for enterprise customers with
| really long maintenance contracts. I'm sure nobody is actually
| working on the architecture anymore - I wonder when the last
| chip came off an assembly line.
| moonbug wrote:
| more itaniums shipped as keyrings than socketed processors.
| swalsh wrote:
| Intel is behind at the moment, but it's hardly in a downward
| spiral.
| bitwize wrote:
| True before the M1. False now.
| moonbug wrote:
| there's the small matter of these things called contractual
| obligations.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > This architecture accelerated Intel's downward spiral. It
| should have been shut down years ago, and I find it surprising
| in the changelog that Intel "is still officially shipping chips
| until July 29, 2021" no wonder Intel is behind on innovation.
|
| I don't think so:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4:
|
| > Launched November 20, 2000
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium:
|
| > Launched June 2001
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core:
|
| > Launched January 2006
|
| You seem to be basically claiming their downward spiral started
| before their biggest recent upswing, which doesn't make sense.
| Itanium (and the Pentium 4) were mistakes that they managed to
| recover from _15 years ago_. However, it 's only just being
| discontinued because Intel's not a company that's willing and
| eager to leave their existing customers in a lurch.
|
| Edit: it sounds like HP was basically paying Intel to keep
| Itanium alive:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#HP_vs._Oracle:
|
| > ...court documents unsealed by a Santa Clara County Court
| judge revealed that in 2008, Hewlett-Packard had paid Intel
| around $440 million to keep producing and updating Itanium
| microprocessors from 2009 to 2014. In 2010, the two companies
| signed another $250 million deal, which obliged Intel to
| continue making Itanium CPUs for HP's machines until 2017.
|
| According the the article, the latest Itatium processor was
| released in, surprise!, 2017.
| jcranmer wrote:
| If you were to ask most Intel employees about this
| announcement, the reaction you'd get would be "wait, we still
| make Itanium?" Whatever Itanium team is working on it still is
| clearly pretty small.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Can we un-orphan this by recreating this architecture using open
| source hardware? (A tall technological order, I know :) )
|
| Would there be patent problems, or potentially copyright
| problems?
|
| Would there be a single person in the world who actually likes
| Itanium enough? Is there really no point at all?
| dsr_ wrote:
| The kind of people who want to work on vintage hardware usually
| want to work on vintage hardware that is either cheap or
| beloved or both. I think Itanium is neither.
| bitwize wrote:
| How about we not and devote resources to crowdsourcing open
| source Alpha-architecture chips. You know, the 64-bit
| powerhouse architecture Itanium killed with its weirdness and
| lameness.
|
| I know Jay Maynard (of Tron cosplay fame) runs an Itanic server
| in his house. Mainly because the ISA is so rare in the wild
| that it's unlikely to be affected by shotgun malware attacks.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Same thing that happened to Transmeta ???. Too much dependence on
| software magic.
| wmf wrote:
| Transmeta was reborn as Nvidia Denver... which is not that
| successful either.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| > While intel is still officially shipping chips until July 29,
| 2021, it's unlikely that any such orders actually exist.
|
| We got two delivered a month or two ago. These ones are never
| going to run Linux, so it makes no difference if they drop
| support.
| secondcoming wrote:
| What do you use them for, if you don't mind me asking?
| emidln wrote:
| Most likely VMS
| zokier wrote:
| I'd say HP-UX is at least as likely.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| They'll be running OpenVMS. Funny - HPE sold that last
| batch of hardware, but they refused to sell software to
| go along with it - you have to go over to VSI to get
| that.
|
| It's just an Ingres database and batch processing data
| into and out of it. Can you believe Ingres is still
| around?!?
|
| The replacement is a DataBricks/Spark system, but it's
| years behind schedule - that's why they had to buy new
| servers before production ended. It makes me sad that to
| match the performance of a 2nd-gen dual core Itanium (the
| entry-level processor back then - 10 years ago), we need
| a 10-node cluster and all the guys are hand tuning their
| partition parameters just to get to that performance
| level.
| icedchai wrote:
| I still have nostalgia for OpenVMS. One of the first
| multi-user systems I worked on was a VAX! I bought an
| AlphaStation off of ebay a few years back and boot up VMS
| now and then.
| boulos wrote:
| Ahh the memories of dealing with Itanium for our large SGI boxes.
| It was super awesome to have a single system multi terabyte
| memory "machine" in 2005.
|
| It was not awesome to keep adjusting out code to be more amenable
| to the VLIW-like needs of the processor (Intel's compiler
| actually generated very good messages as to "why we didn't do a
| good job with your code", you just often couldn't do anything
| with that info).
|
| I still remain amused to guess what kinds of programs were
| included in the architecture simulations that led them to want so
| many integer units (12?) and so few floating point ones.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > I still remain amused to guess what kinds of programs were
| included in the architecture simulations that led them to want
| so many integer units (12?) and so few floating point ones.
|
| If I had to guess, SPEC Int.
|
| I one had a frank conversation with a CPU designer at a chip
| company. I was looking at a CPU that was fairly wide
| superscalar, but had super tiny caches. I observed that this
| chip was probably only efficient at running Dhrystone. His
| response was "We win and lose 7 figure CPU sales based off of
| Dhrystone benchmarks. DMIPS/Watt is the only benchmark that
| matters for the majority of our sales in dollars"
| boulos wrote:
| Sure. Specint and the more modern specintrate are obvious
| choices for "we can't suck at this". But the overall
| architecture was so extremely over "int heavy" that the box
| was just not great for the supercomputing segment it claimed
| to want to play in.
|
| Maybe large Oracle databases, too?
|
| The architecture really was the only game in town for a while
| for having so many physical memory address bits. I just
| assume someone "resold" it to the HPC/supercomputing groups
| as "here, go sell this".
| bonzini wrote:
| Not as bad as Niagara, that thing had what, 1 FPU shared by
| eight cores? Great for Java, a bit less for PHP that only
| had floating point arithmetic...
| boulos wrote:
| Poor Niagara :). The Niagara design though was _clearly_
| intended for web serving /databases _and_ Sun didn 't go
| try selling it into the LINPACK/supercomputing segment.
| That's the disconnect for me.
|
| To be clear, if you had a multi-hundred processor system
| sitting around (as we kind of did, thanks SGI!), you used
| it. But... you probably shouldn't have purchased it.
| moonbug wrote:
| ours mostly just ran x86 code..
| boulos wrote:
| On the funny Pentium3 equivalent thing bolted on? Or you mean
| in emulation mode?
| dhess wrote:
| TPC OLTP.
| muth02446 wrote:
| And I thought Itanium was designed for Linpack ;-)
| jerrysievert wrote:
| I remember my time at the OSDL when we got our first itanium
| servers in. I recall that even though we were "partnered" with
| Intel, it already felt like an orphaned architecture. once the
| mainstream press started calling it "itanic", it seemed even more
| doomed.
|
| I'm mostly sad to remember that the itanium was supposed to be a
| "replacement" for the DEC alpha, and Compaq selling the IP to
| Intel. very sad day for computing.
| spamizbad wrote:
| It's really a shame IA64 accelerated the deaths of Alpha and
| PA-RISC. Not sure they could have survived x86-64 or ARM64 but
| they still had legs when Itanium hit the scene.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| I'm not entirely convinced that x86-64 would have come on the
| scene in its current form had itanium not been invested into
| so heavily by intel (and been such a failure).
|
| remember, intel seemed hesitant to extend the x86
| architecture, and x86-64 came out of AMD.
| lizknope wrote:
| Linux used to refer to the arch as amd64 and then Intel
| copied it a few years later.
|
| AMD licensed the EV6 bus from DEC and there was some
| discussion of having motherboards that could accept either
| an AMD K7 or DEC Alpha and just flash the BIOS. That might
| have made the Alpha last longer by having more low cost
| motherboards
| acomjean wrote:
| I don't think anything could have survived the rise of X86.
| Most x86 chips were 32 bit at the time and you need
| Alpha/Sparc/PA-Risc, or some fancy custom chips to work in 64
| bit.
|
| I wonder if the AMD/Intel competetion pushed x86 to get as
| fast as it got surpassing all those custom chips?
|
| HP was involved in Itanium and was discontinuing there own
| chip lines. We were talking about moving to it, for the
| "superdome" line of machines. I was working with PA-RISC at
| the time, and it seemed like this was the next chip. But it
| wasn't compatible with PA-RISC but had an x86 compatibility
| mode..
|
| It was a weird chip, and required really good compilers. I
| thought it was long dead. It was interesting though..
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518758
| rodgerd wrote:
| My impression was that HP essentially convinced Intel to
| build next-gen PA-RISC for them; for HP it was mostly a
| success in that it kept HP Unix and VMS running.
| mhh__ wrote:
| ARMs rise seems to be almost miraculous considering that I
| struggle to find any contemporary discussion of it as a
| serious ISA from back in the day.
| mrpippy wrote:
| MIPS as well. SGI announced the Itanium switch and dialed
| back MIPS investment in 1998, but Itanium wasn't really
| usable until Itanium 2 in ~2003.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I wonder how would people feel about itanium failure had it been
| developed by anyone other than Intel; I mean, would there be that
| lingering feeling it could have been something had only the right
| amount of resources put into it etc etc?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Maybe? The architecture is weird -- it required user programs
| to be aware of and utilize superscalar pipelining. Superscalar
| pipelining was a great bet, the assumption that programmers and
| application writers could explicitly take advantage of it was
| not. It's a really COOL architecture, but I'm not sure it could
| ever have been a commercially successful one.
| moonbug wrote:
| no. in order VLIW dependent on handwaving compiler magic never
| works.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I still think there is a medium between the two that could
| work - if you look at uops per port measurements there's
| still a lot of room left for improvements i.e. the mantra is
| "The compiler will never know more than the chip" but
| sometimes the CPU is pretty dumb too
| unilynx wrote:
| For comparison, how do you feel about Transmeta?
| CalChris wrote:
| Itanium was actually developed by HP starting in 1989 and then
| Intel joined in 1994.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| Not only that but in the early 2000s HP effectively gave
| Intel all their hardware design team to help with the effort.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| You know an architecture is dead when even Linux gives up on it.
| Mixed feelings on this architecture. Oh well...
| SloopJon wrote:
| > It's dead, Jim.
|
| I wonder how many folks would miss this reference. If I'm not
| mistaken, it's only in the original series. On the other hand, I
| guess Itanium is even more obscure than Star Trek at this point.
|
| I tend to assume that most people know at least as much as I do,
| so I was taken aback when, after explaining line endings to a co-
| worker, she asked, "What's DOS?"
| Taniwha wrote:
| Yeah, but I think you're supposed to follow it with the
| obligatory "You get his phaser, I'll get his wallet"
| singingboyo wrote:
| I think "he's dead, Jim" is/was common enough that many people
| would recognize it as a reference. Some would probably even
| know it as a Star Trek thing, but I suspect there are a bunch
| of people who know it references something but don't care
| enough to find out what.
|
| The line stands well enough on its own without context, so it
| can be used even without knowing what its referring to... but
| it clearly is a reference.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > I suspect there are a bunch of people who know it
| references something but don't care enough to find out what.
|
| Yeah I'm in this boat. They say this on Reddit all the time
| so I know it's a reference to something, but like you said I
| never bothered to check what it's actually a reference to.
| bitwize wrote:
| YouTube's accursed algorithm bubbled a video into my
| recommendations with the provocative title: "What happened to
| the A and B drives in Windows?"
|
| It suddenly hit me that there are adults alive today who have
| only ever known PCs without floppy drives.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| A friend of mine is named Jim. I was working with him one day
| and received a "He's dead, Jim" error from Google Chrome. He
| became very confused.
|
| "Why is it calling you Jim? How are you signed-in to Chrome?"
|
| "I'm not. I don't use that stuff."
|
| "Why is it calling you Jim then?"
|
| "It calls everybody Jim. That's a quote from Star Trek."
|
| He assumed the error message was personalized based on how you
| were signed-in to Chrome.
|
| Turns out that, though he's a big Star Wars and Dr. Who fan, he
| managed to completely avoid Star Trek TOS. I found the phrase
| to be used ubiquitously too but, apparently, not so much that
| he ever noticed it.
| beervirus wrote:
| >after explaining line endings to a co-worker, she asked,
| "What's DOS?"
|
| How old was she? I bet there are plenty of people born in the
| late 80s / early 90s who've never used DOS. Windows 95 changed
| everything.
| p1necone wrote:
| The averagely computer literate people that I know in my age
| range (mid-late 20s) refer to the windows command line as
| "DOS". I can't be bothered correcting them.
| moonbug wrote:
| whyever? technically correct is the /best/ sort of correct.
| bonzini wrote:
| What is DOS? Is it COMMAND.COM (of which the Windows
| command prompt is indeed a descendant) or the API
| underneath (INT 21H mostly)?
| temac wrote:
| cmd is rewritten. Most of DOS was in assembly language.
| Most of NT is not. At one point cmd _maybe_ contained
| some straightforward translation to C of some pieces of
| assembly, but I 'm not sure (I'm sure it was a mess
| though; it may have been cleaned up a little now)
|
| But cmd is surely quite compatible with command.com. With
| more capabilities, but still very compatible. And a
| deceivingly close user interface.
| bonzini wrote:
| Yeah I didn't mean a descendant source code-wise. But I
| would say that DOS is more the 16-bit API than
| COMMAND.COM.
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