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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

#31

Post by chx »

From almost exactly ten years ago: How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp

> The MIPS chip, the DEC Alpha (perhaps the fastest chip of its era), and anything else in the pipeline were all cancelled or deemphasized. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it?

> 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.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#33

Post by Theodores »

tyingq wrote: post #5
leetrout wrote: post #2

The 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.

I chuckled. Which was silly as I missed the boat with Linux until Ubuntu came along. The versions of Linux I first saw were mere toys compared to the SGI awesomeness I knew at the time.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#34

Post by Twirrim »

q3k wrote: post #10

Mixed 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 desi…

There's MIPS as well out there, which is being opened up: https://wavecomp.ai/mipsopen

Not sure it presents much of an advantage over any of the existing architectures, or RISC-V, though.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#35

Post by tyingq »

Theodores wrote: post #33
tyingq wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

I chuckled. Which was silly as I missed the boat with Linux until Ubuntu came along. The versions of Linux I first saw were mere toys compared to the SGI awesomeness I knew at the time.

Oh, yeah. I did not see it with early Linux, and like you, thought it was a fun toy. It was specifically the 64 bit x86 thing that caught my attention. The memory ceiling for 32 bit x86 made it easy to ignore Linux. If I remember right, Linux was also still crashing pretty regularly under load just before that time frame too.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#36

Post by Twirrim »

tyingq wrote: post #20
tyingq wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first day I started working for a company that had Sparc/Solaris machines around I got warned about that, and to never use the "killall" command. On linux that kills just matching processes. On Solaris that literally kills all processes.

Even though I haven't had to deal with Solaris in about a decade, and it being safe to do killall, it took me ages to break out of the habit of doing:

    ps waxu | grep "[p]ython" | awk {'print $2'} | xargs kill

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#37

Post by Twirrim »

greglindahl wrote: post #30
ch_123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Novell Netware lived on for a long time running as a VM. Doing that makes it much easier to support new hardware.

I didn't realise Netware had finally been discontinued. That's the server OS I originally cut my teeth on, dealing with IPX/SPX based networks.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#38

Post by gumby »

I wonder what it’s like working on Itanium over the last decade (and perhaps earlier). I can see someone joining early on when the marketing buzz was exciting and reality had not set in.

But now...you’re working on a product that is widely mocked and has no future, yet releases are still being made. How depressing...what causes someone to stay on?

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#39

Post by captainbland »

q3k wrote: post #10

Mixed 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 desi…

You're right, it is kind of disappointing. I think the fact that it would cost so much to come up with something novel and then optimise it to the point that conventional CPUs are at that it seems hardly worth the expenditure. The next major frontier in CPU design would appear to be in materials and manufacturing rather than architecture - although no doubt whatever the post-silicon world looks like will influence future architecture substantially.

Mind you, if nothing beyond the smallest silicon processes turns out to be practical then we might see attention turning back to re-thinking CPU architecture, but until then I think a lot of money will be spent looking at materials and manufacturing over interesting ISAs.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#40

Post by pcwalton »

roblabla wrote: post #26
q3k wrote: post #10

Mixed 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 desi…

OS research is still active though. I see many interesting microkernels being developed left right and center. RedoxOS is trying to build a unix microkernel. Nintendo built Horizon, a capabilities-based microkernel for the Nintendo Switch. Many of Plan9's features have been incorporated into Linux. We have seL4, a formally proven kernel that is still in active development (they are currently working hard on getting a…

Also Fuchsia at Google.
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