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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

#71

Post by Twirrim »

pjmlp wrote: post #60
Twirrim wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> got to love those coaxial cable terminators.

Man. So many memories of walking around the school with a cable tester trying to find where the ring had been broken this time.

I was so glad to see that ring network be retired.

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

#72

Post by otabdeveloper2 »

Klathmon wrote: post #66
q3k wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means. Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?

"^W" is this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-Transmission-Block_char...

In Unix line editors it is traditionally used to mean 'erase the previous word'.

See also documentation for ASCII (http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/ascii.html for example) for origins of ^C, ^D, ^S, etc.

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

#73

Post by hyperman1 »

Twirrim wrote: post #36
tyingq wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" |…

I've always wondered why they inclued it. There seems to be literally no uses for it, even no case where it is anything but dangerous. Even when shutting down the system, init needs to run. Can anybody enlighten me?

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

#74

Post by lemoncucumber »

Klathmon wrote: post #66
q3k wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means. Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?

It’s used the same way strikethrough is used, for reasons others have explained.

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

#75

Post by lemoncucumber »

pjmlp wrote: post #58
q3k wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Midori project out of Microsoft seemed pretty interesting, despite not ever turning into a shipping OS.

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

#76

Post by Denvercoder9 »

gumby wrote: post #65
ghaff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

True, my point is that itanium itself was a laughingstock, and clearly with no future, so must have been embarrassing to talk to your friends about what you do for work. Making spare parts for the B-52, or maintaining security fixes for Solaris (which has its fanatic fans) can be rewarding, no question. But to work on the Itanium any time in the last decade must have been soul-sucking.

> so must have been embarrassing to talk to your friends about what you do for work.

Not everyone's identity is based on what they work on.

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

#77

Post by bogomipz »

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…

>"Itanium is what EFI was first developed for."

What is EFI here - extensible firmware interface? If so what is the connection between that and Itanium?

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

#78

Post by tyingq »

hyperman1 wrote: post #73
Twirrim wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" |…

I've always wondered why they inclued it. There seems to be literally no uses for it, even no case where it is anything but dangerous. Even when shutting down the system, init needs to run. Can anybody enlighten me?

"killall - kill all active processes killall is used by shutdown (1M) to kill all active processes not directly related to the shutdown procedure "

So, intended for use by shutdown(1M) and nothing else. It's basically a completely different utility to the Linux one. They just happen to, unfortunately, share the same name.

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

#79

Post by anarazel »

classichasclass wrote: post #16
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.

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.

PA-RISCs lacking support for any meaningful support for any atomics except TAS (one with weird alignment reqs) forced me to add an atomics emulation layer to postgres. So I somewhat hate it now ;)

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

#80

Post by twtw »

ghaff wrote: post #59
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?

I don't think "Silicon Valley" is the descriptor you are looking for here.

Intel and HP (where the people "supporting and incrementally enhancing" itanium hw & sw work) are very much Silicon Valley companies.

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