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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

#41

Post by pcwalton »

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…

x86-64 is anything but "boring" and "safe". :)

Real mode, Mod R/M and SIB byte encoding weirdness, REX prefixes, 80-bit floats, parity flag, hard-wired registers for shifts/multiplies/divisions, builtin CRC32 over the wrong polynomial, Pascal calling convention support, binary-coded decimal, high halves of 16-bit registers, MMX overlap with x87 floating point, etc. etc.

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

#42

Post by ttul »

I got to work with one of the first Itanium machines back in 2000 working as an intern. My job was to port Perl to IA-64. It was an amazingly fast machine - like living a few years into the future.

I can see why it failed to gain mass traction, but that’s a shame. IA-64 was so innovative.

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

#43

Post by trhway »

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…

The ghost of VLIW is still rumbling around like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S

And the RISC (possibly DEC Alpha "inspired") - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway_SW26010

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

#45

Post by josteink »

pcwalton wrote: post #40
roblabla wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let’s be honest: the only reason Fuschia exists, is so Google can ship a Android-platform 100% free of GPL-code in the future.

There’s nothing in it for anyone else.

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

#46

Post by shereadsthenews »

skynetv2 wrote: post #15
johnklos wrote: post #14

They 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.

Hand-written code for Itanium was always smoking fast. One-clock microkernel message passes and other insanity. But nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine.

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

#47

Post by zamalek »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #46
skynetv2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hand-written code for Itanium was always smoking fast. One-clock microkernel message passes and other insanity. But nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine.

> nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine

Were a lot of people trying? It was a pretty difficult platform to get hold of and tinker with.

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

#48

Post by barbecue_sauce »

peatmoss wrote: post #17
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…

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 c…

Couldn't it be argued that a monoculture oriented around a specific architecture actually makes it easier to learn and understand the system guts, because of the stability of available learning materials and knowledge resources?

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

#49

Post by shereadsthenews »

zamalek wrote: post #47
shereadsthenews wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hand-written code for Itanium was always smoking fast. One-clock microkernel message passes and other insanity. But nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine.

> nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine Were a lot of people trying? It was a pretty difficult platform to get hold of and tinker with.

I’m not sure how many people, but it’s all the compiler group at HP did for the last twenty years.

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

#50

Post by einr »

peatmoss wrote: post #17
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…

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 c…

NeXT won the desktop

Really? Mac OS has maybe 15% desktop market share.

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