Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
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Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#2The end of an era and one of the worst technology bets / choices. Every time I hear Itanium I think of SGI going under.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#3So HPUX finally dies. Doesn't leave much of the original commercial RISC/Unix players still on some level of life support. I guess there's still AIX/Power.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#4[deleted]
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#5The end of an era and one of the worst technology bets / choices. Every time I hear Itanium I think of SGI going under.
The original RISC/Unix players were most of my career. Pyramid MIPS/OSX, then Sparc/SunOS, AIX, PA-RISC/HPUX, Dec Ultrix followed by Alpha, etc. I remember trying to tell my co-workers that Linux would wipe it all out, shortly after AMD rolled out Opteron. Most of them chuckled.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#6So HPUX finally dies. Doesn't leave much of the original commercial RISC/Unix players still on some level of life support. I guess there's still AIX/Power.
What stops HP from porting it to other architectures?
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#7So HPUX finally dies. Doesn't leave much of the original commercial RISC/Unix players still on some level of life support. I guess there's still AIX/Power.
What stops HP from porting it to other architectures?
Demand. Porting from PA-RISC to Itanium wasn't pain free for end users. Porting to Linux/x64 isn't likely much more effort than some HPUX/x64 that doesn't exist yet.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#8So HPUX finally dies. Doesn't leave much of the original commercial RISC/Unix players still on some level of life support. I guess there's still AIX/Power.
Last I looked, they were porting HP/UX over to x86. The port came up in the whole HP vs Oracle lawsuit.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#9The end of an era and one of the worst technology bets / choices. Every time I hear Itanium I think of SGI going under.
The original RISC/Unix players were most of my career. Pyramid MIPS/OSX, then Sparc/SunOS, AIX, PA-RISC/HPUX, Dec Ultrix followed by Alpha, etc. I remember trying to tell my co-workers that Linux would wipe it all out, shortly after AMD rolled out Opteron. Most of them chuckled.
Which of those proprietary systems were your favorite (or hated least) and why? Which did you dislike the most?
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#10Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance.
On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started.
Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe designs possible: IA32/amd64. ARM was kinda quirky (conditional execution, barrel shifter), but those were slowly neutered (by introducing Thumb), and then totally thrown out of the window with aarch64. SPARC is dead. PA-RISC is dead. RISC-V is new and promising, but is also the most pragmatic and safe design of an ISA ever. The Mill CPU is interesting, but is underfunded and I don't think it will ever be taped out.
Similar as with OS research (think: Solaris, Plan9/Inferno), researchy and experimental CPU ISAs seem to be a thing of the past now.