[HN Gopher] Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6...
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Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
Author : scrlk
Score : 60 points
Date : 2023-11-02 15:31 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| jamiek88 wrote:
| It's funny thinking back to the hype cycle of Itanium back in the
| heady days where performance was doubling every year, desktop was
| king and this was the _future_.
|
| Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the
| future.
|
| Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always.
| chx wrote:
| 2009 summary
| https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp
|
| > The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a
| niche processor sealed the fate of Intel--and perhaps the
| entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for
| the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level.
|
| > It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we
| didn't know that the next level was below us, not above. The
| next level was the basement, in fact. Hopefully Intel won't
| come up with any more bright ideas like the Itanium. We can't
| afford to excavate another level down.
| cubefox wrote:
| This piece sounds like a lot of misrepresentation and
| exaggeration.
| chx wrote:
| Whether the DEC Alpha development stopped because of Merced
| (as it was called then) or because of the 1997 legal mess
| https://www.wired.com/1997/10/intel-dec-settle-alpha-chip-
| di... is quite hard to say.
|
| The DEC Alpha architecture was planned for 25 years and it
| certainly was not technical barriers that killed the Alpha
| 21464.
| jabl wrote:
| In the end it was market forces that did it in. Making
| new chips was (still is!) exponentially more expensive
| for each generation, and at the same time mass market
| chips were getting better and better while they could
| amortize the NRE costs over zillions of chips sold,
| eating the market from below. And other RISC competitors
| (and IA-64) were attacking from the sides. DEC just
| didn't have the customer base or depth of pockets to fund
| Alpha development. That it was Itanium that ultimately
| delivered the coup de grace was but the final insult.
| postmodest wrote:
| As someone working in that space at that time, IA64 was still
| losing to Sparc64 the entire time. We would do big boxes on
| Solaris and replace older Sun boxes with ia32 Pentium Pros.
| There wasn't really ever a point at which we thought "hm, RISC
| isn't working for us, we need VLIW" ...and we were an HP
| shop!!!
| brookst wrote:
| I still get confused whether the real name is _Itanium_ or
| _Itanic_
| rasz wrote:
| It was only the future until release date forced it to face the
| reality.
|
| Linus Torvalds in 2003:
| https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/x86.html
|
| >Itanium 2 doesn't hold a candle to a P4 on any real-world
| benchmarks.
| twoodfin wrote:
| _Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always._
|
| I'm not particularly confused about Intel's perspective on
| compatibility: Even at the time, there were several examples of
| successful platform CPU transitions across architectural "full
| breaks". Apple going from 68k to PowerPC is the closest analogy
| for Intel, and if the Itanium performance and software
| (compiler) story had played out as Intel envisioned they likely
| would have been fine.
|
| But as for ubiquity, I'm befuddled. As far as I've been able to
| determine--having lived through it and followed many
| retrospective threads like this looking for new evidence--Intel
| had _no plans_ on any useful timeline to turn Itanium into a
| (non-workstation) desktop or laptop chip. Did they really think
| the market would stay bifurcated between "big iron"
| architectures and x86 personal machines for another decade? I
| can't imagine they would have believed that.
| reidacdc wrote:
| On the one hand, I am not surprised -- at my workplace, we only
| ever had one Itanium system, an SGI Altix 3000-series computer.
| It was kind of niche even when we bought it, and core-for-core,
| the Itanium CPUs were slower than their competitors. What the SGI
| was really good at was MPI parallelism. I don't know how much of
| that was the CPU and how much was the overall system design of
| the Altix, which featured a pretty amazing interconnection fabric
| (CrayLink, I think?), and cache-coherency and a sophisticated
| memory model. But not all problems parallelized well, so the
| system ended up kind of being this weird outlier that was a good
| answer to some classes of problems, but you had to remember it
| existed.
|
| On the other hand, it's a bit of a shame to formally, officially
| lose another option out of the computing ecosystem.
| cy384 wrote:
| numalink, 1.6GB/s in 2003!
|
| there's an altix 3000 on ebay that I'm kinda tempted by
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/174917876903
|
| it only runs like one specific version of suse or red hat
| pixelesque wrote:
| Previous discussion from a few days ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38115989
| jl6 wrote:
| The latest 9700 models from 2017 are still in support until 2025!
| linsomniac wrote:
| I presume you mean "by Intel", because Linux has other ideas.
| :-)
| pram wrote:
| The Itanium sales forecasts never fail to make me laugh. Aged
| like the finest wine:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
| tux3 wrote:
| Contrast with the notorious IAE solar forecast:
| https://zenmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/iea-vs-reality-...
|
| Statistics and modeling are complicated, granted. But when your
| model diverges from reality 5 years in a row, perhaps you
| should just extrapolate the current line next time around.
|
| (In the case of the Itanic, that would have been the line at 0.
| Still a better forecast than what they did!)
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Contrast with the notorious IAE solar forecast
|
| "There's no way this level of growth can be sustainable."
|
| "Surely we've hit a stable level by now."
|
| "Maybe that last year was a fluke."
|
| Love to see it. :)
| nullc wrote:
| Easily one of the best illustrations on Wikipedia.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| I had a manager that loved these things. He would show horn eBay
| one's into any gambling backend he did. It was terrible,
| impossible to support and made accomplishing anything a chore.
| Rust in peace.
| dvaletin wrote:
| Why it took so long?
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(page generated 2023-11-04 23:00 UTC)