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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

#81

Post by dmitrygr »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #48
peatmoss wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Consider the Cavendish banana. We understand it pretty well. We still can't save it. Same thing here.

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

#82

Post by hawflakes »

spamizbad wrote: post #51
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.

Itanium was created precisely because HP thought it couldn't keep PA-RISC competitive. So they threw in with Intel to create the next great server architecture.

As an aside, Merced too forever for Intel to tape out. Part of the agreements between HP and Intel was that they needed to ship chips for HP. As a result, Intel had to fab some of the last PA-RISC chips due to the schedule slip and contractual obligations.

I worked on some Itanium system software once upon a time.

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

#84

Post by Aloha »

justin66 wrote: post #62
ithkuil wrote: post #44

OpenVMS port to x86-64 still work in progress: http://www.openvms.org/node/111

Their last update is from 16 months ago?

No, there are more recent updates:

https://www.vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html

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

#85

Post by ghaff »

twtw wrote: post #80
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?

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.

Probably startup culture is a better descriptor though I do think you often see the same mindset in at least outside looking in attitudes about the newer large SV employers.

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

#86

Post by twtw »

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.

> Took me a while, but I got 97% efficiency with single core DGEMM.

In my experience, it's pretty widely accepted that VLIW (and EPIC) can achieve high performance and efficiency on highly regular tasks such as GEMM and FFT. That's why VLIW has been and continues to be popular for DSPs. The struggle for VLIW is general purpose code that doesn't necessarily have that same kind of regularity.

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

#87

Post by Klathmon »

q3k wrote: post #68
Klathmon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Emacs/readline bindings for Delete Word. Open up a bash shell, type in `foo bar baz`, then press ctrl-W twice. '^W' is what would appear instead if you weren't in a readline/emacs editor, but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving '^W' behind makes it look like you didn't realize what you just corrected is still visible. It's a joke. I've now explained and ruined it.

Ah okay makes sense! It's amazing the gaps in knowledge I still have with a lot of things.

I've used Linux daily for like 15 years now, and I know about control characters, but since I never really used emacs (or readline beyond the copy+pasted command here or there) I just completely missed the meaning.

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

#88

Post by bluedino »

q3k wrote: post #68
Klathmon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Emacs/readline bindings for Delete Word. Open up a bash shell, type in `foo bar baz`, then press ctrl-W twice. '^W' is what would appear instead if you weren't in a readline/emacs editor, but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving '^W' behind makes it look like you didn't realize what you just corrected is still visible. It's a joke. I've now explained and ruined it.

Slashdot posters would use ^H^H in their posts (backspace)

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

#89

Post by ch_123 »

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 pinnacle of Intel overengineering.

I think the i432 would be a worthy challenger to that title

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432

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

#90

Post by ghaff »

hawflakes wrote: post #82
spamizbad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Itanium was created precisely because HP thought it couldn't keep PA-RISC competitive. So they threw in with Intel to create the next great server architecture. As an aside, Merced too forever for Intel to tape out. Part of the agreements between HP and Intel was that they needed to ship chips for HP. As a result, Intel had to fab some of the last PA-RISC chips due to the schedule slip and contractual obligations. I…

Timing was at least part of the problem with Itanium. Arguably, had Merced (or, ideally, McKinley) shipped while the great Internet buildout was going on, Itanium might have made it over birthing pains before the dot-com crash and then been in a position to ward off Opteron and AMD64 when those arrived.

I could argue it was doomed from the beginning as well for various technical reasons given how the industry evolved. But there's at least an argument that better time to market might have been enough to get established as a dominant 64-bit architecture.

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