Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 211 posts

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

#51

Post by spamizbad »

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…

PA-RISC was my favorite from that time. If it had the software stack of Sun commercial Unix might still be a thing.

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

#52

Post by q3k »

pcwalton wrote: post #41
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.

Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal with in the name of backwards compatibility.

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

#53

Post by q3k »

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.

You're right, Fuchsia might be the closest modern day equivalent of Bell Labs and their OS research.

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

#54

Post by q3k »

josteink wrote: post #45
pcwalton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think Fuchsia exists mostly to keep talented OS research people busy and make them stay at the company.

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

#55

Post by vardump »

josteink wrote: post #45
pcwalton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fuchsia is a pretty nice and clean design. I do see other use for it as well.

Although I'm a little worried about driver performance, especially in cases when there's just ~100 microseconds time for the driver to react.

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

#57

Post by mrpippy »

tyingq wrote: post #7
anonymfus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. Whereas porting away from OpenVMS is a lot of effort, so it's worth the effort for VMS Software to port OpenVMS to x86_64

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

#58

Post by pjmlp »

q3k wrote: post #53
pcwalton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Fuchsia at Google.

You're right, Fuchsia might be the closest modern day equivalent of Bell Labs and their OS research.

MS Research also does quite a few cool things, some of them landed up on Windows USB stack, WSL, SQL Server deployment on Linux, .NET Native, async/await, driver validation with Z3, for example.

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

#59

Post by ghaff »

gumby wrote: post #38

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?

A lot of people have good jobs supporting and incrementally enhancing legacy products and product lines of various kinds in software, computer hardware, and in many other areas. It’s mostly a Silicon Valley concept that if you’re not working on something ground-breaking you’re wasting your life. And how many people at some of those big SV companies are mostly just working on ad tech?

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

#60

Post by pjmlp »

Twirrim wrote: post #37
greglindahl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Me too. :)

We used it for a Clipper based management application.

My first task was bringing back to life our school labs network, so that we could use it for that application, got to love those coaxial cable terminators.

Post reply on HN