It's x86 all the way down.
Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
11–20 of 211 posts
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool.
The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it much easier to find help from other people, Makefiles that just worked, SSL accelerator boards, etc. Ask anyone that worked with zones, for example, and we find all the buzz about docker and linux containers quite funny.
I probably hated AIX the most. It was tantalizingly close to other Unix implementations, but with enough differences that things would sort-of work, but not really. To be fair, there was a "right" way to do things that worked, but I was naturally trying to use knowledge I already had. It was also the platform most likely to bomb out when trying to compile open source software. Lots of tweaking makefiles, environment variables, compiler flags, etc, to get things to work. They had a sysadmin tool called "smitty" that I particularly hated.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#13So 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.
There was talk of this, but it went away. The last suggestion I’ve read about were some kind of ‘containers’ which emulate HP-UX
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3196353/data-center/hpe-offe...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_projec...
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#14They shouldn't have killed an excellent processor (the Alpha) which already had tons of software and history and was already being used in the fastest supercomputers in the world for a product that was never (and still isn't) proven. The Itanic was never best in its class at anything.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#15They shouldn't have killed an excellent processor (the Alpha) which already had tons of software and history and was already being used in the fastest supercomputers in the world for a product that was never (and still isn't) proven. The Itanic was never best in its class at anything.
agreed, Itanium investment should have gone to the Alpha.
Itanium was really good at raw performance as long as you could write hand tuned math kernels or kept working with the compiler team to optimize code for your kernel. Took me a while, but I got 97% efficiency with single core DGEMM.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#16The 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.
The first machine I ever had root on was a PA-RISC K250 running HP/UX 10.20. Good times. I particularly miss PA-RISC: it was a pretty clean instruction set with good performance, and HP never got their money's worth out of Itanic. There's a C8000 in my collection with dual PA-8900s in it.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which of those proprietary systems were your favorite (or hated least) and why? Which did you dislike the most?
I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it mu…
My early career involved compiling a lot of software that would have been better run on Linux or some BSD variant for AIX. I can confirm that building stuff like a custom Apache stack on AIX (don’t ask) was like pulling teeth using XLC.
I’m not really old enough to be an actual grey beard, but I got just enough hands-on experience with late-period Big Commercial Unix to feel like I at least swept floors and fetched coffee in the exclusive club. Cool, even if it was frustrating at times.
I guess that is the thing: we’ve settled into a monoculture that makes me deeply uncomfortable. NeXT won the desktop, but there’s only implementation. And Linux won the server. But in the meantime, I feel like only OpenBSD is credibly providing public infrastructure that everyone uses.
I kind of worry that we’re heading toward a world in which nobody really understands the guts of the systems that sit underneath modern cloud / containerized services. Furthermore, because that stuff isn’t as exciting as the Javascript framework de jure, the amount of innovation happening in the lower layers is nonexistent.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which of those proprietary systems were your favorite (or hated least) and why? Which did you dislike the most?
I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it mu…
Interesting. I've been an AIX dweeb since 3.2.5 and it's actually my favourite proprietary Unix mostly because it's so ornery. I still have a POWER6 running it that handles most of my web and mail tasks.
In fact, I tend to develop on it since if it works on AIX it will be portable enough to work other places. That said, I like xlc performance but I despise its weird command line options. I mostly just use gcc on AIX also.
I do prefer smit to things like HP-UX sam, but I'm accustomed to IBM overengineering. ;)
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which of those proprietary systems were your favorite (or hated least) and why? Which did you dislike the most?
I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it mu…
I worked for Ibm Websphere 1998-2002 in those days. I supported Aix, HP/UX, Solaris 8, and 4 rpm based Linux versions. Our job was to do nightly builds and test on each OS with DB2, Oracle etc. HP/UX and Aix were menu driven and painful for automation. Solaris was much more fun to work with. Redhat, SuSE, Yellowdog and mandrake were the linux distros. No yum to handle dependencies. I remember working on bash a lot to handle package dependencies.
One day I got an Itanium from Microsoft. It was fun to play with. Sadly I was forbidden from opening the server. It was so alpha that adjusting the clock would kill the server. It never went very far due to being so alpha.
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which of those proprietary systems were your favorite (or hated least) and why? Which did you dislike the most?
I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it mu…
Oh, forgot to mention a funny thing about Sparc machines. It was trivially easy to accidentally halt the system by sending a break from the console. That's accidentally pressing one key on a serial console. I remember some company selling inline serial filters for $100 each.