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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

#91

Post by twtw »

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.

I thought it was fairly clear 'q3k was referring to the 64 bit ISA introduced in amd64, not all the legacy stuff either kept around in some form for compatibility (x87, encodings) or stuff that isn't part of long mode (BCD, segmentation, real mode).

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

#92

Post by protomyth »

Twirrim wrote: post #71
pjmlp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are buying a new iSeries and the IBM person was very specific that the terminal we have in the server room is NOT supported anymore without some weird interface board. I was kind of sad at the thought. Even sadder knowing I'm going have to load IBM's client access software on some poor PC.

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

#93

Post by acdha »

ghaff wrote: post #90
hawflakes wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Being a couple years late definitely was bad but they also completely blew the performance, especially for ia32 compatibility. Shipping on time would have made the performance gap less bad but I rarely saw it being competitive with what would have been the competition at that time even before you factored cost in. Unless your workload was just Intel’s hand-tuned assembly it was usually cheaper to buy 2 x86 boxes and pocket the difference.

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

#94

Post by classichasclass »

Twirrim wrote: post #34
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.

MIPS today isn't what it used to be. It mostly occupies the "we're too cheap to use ARM" segment of the market these days, which is an ignominious fate for what used to be a great architecture. But it's well known and it still has its wonderful instruction set, so maybe someone can make it shine again once it goes fully open.

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

#95

Post by ghaff »

acdha wrote: post #93
ghaff wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Being a couple years late definitely was bad but they also completely blew the performance, especially for ia32 compatibility. Shipping on time would have made the performance gap less bad but I rarely saw it being competitive with what would have been the competition at that time even before you factored cost in. Unless your workload was just Intel’s hand-tuned assembly it was usually cheaper to buy 2 x86 boxes and…

You're absolutely right, hence my hesitancy. IA-32 emulation performance was one particular weak spot. A fellow analyst at the time said something along the lines of "Itanium's IA-32 performance was not only not in the ballpark; it was not in the parking lot outside the ballpark."

Itanium was also, in many ways, designed for a world where ILP, rather than TLP, ruled. That distinction wouldn't become terribly important for a few more years but it would have eventually. Intel made a number of decisions in this vein. See also NetBurst Architecture. (An Intel exec told me, at some point after it had become obvious that multi-core was the future, that Microsoft had really pressured Intel to go down the few/fast cores route.)

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

#96

Post by danmaz74 »

captainbland wrote: post #39
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 fu…

I wonder if something new could emerge to help with massive parallelism, beyond what gpus already do.

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

#97

Post by pjmlp »

lemoncucumber wrote: post #75
pjmlp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least it influenced async/await, TPL, .NET Native, Span, local refs, ref structs, blittable structs, and few other C# 7.x and 8.0 features.

Reading between the lines of some Joe Duffy posts, I think Midori was a victim of rise to power from WinDev after that whole Longhorn/Vista history, only to end with UWP slowly getting back all the .NET features that they decided to throw away on the initial version of WinRT.

Apparently post .NET Core 3.0 there will be some changes happening to .NET Native. It was briefly mentioned at Connect 2018, but they didn't wanted to precise what exactly.

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

#98

Post by andrekandre »

einr wrote: post #50
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…

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

i think it was meant in relation to unix, not in general overall

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

#99

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

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 still are interesting cpus available. Like the Greenarrays forth chips: www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.html

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

#100

Post by Twirrim »

protomyth wrote: post #92
Twirrim wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We are buying a new iSeries and the IBM person was very specific that the terminal we have in the server room is NOT supported anymore without some weird interface board. I was kind of sad at the thought. Even sadder knowing I'm going have to load IBM's client access software on some poor PC.

SNA? It's super fantastic fun. Honest.

I worked for an egovernment company several years ago. A state (county?) agency built a service with us, and wouldn't expose the actual database to us, just an SNA supporting interface. We were essentially scraping the data. Messy, unsanitised data. I really didn't envy the developer who looked after that particular application.

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