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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

#111

Post by icelancer »

Theodores wrote: post #33
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.

I chuckled. Which was silly as I missed the boat with Linux until Ubuntu came along. The versions of Linux I first saw were mere toys compared to the SGI awesomeness I knew at the time.

I figured it out right around Slackware becoming a big distro; that would be in the late 90s / early 2000s. It was pretty clear to me, but I was young and a new entrant to the industry.

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

#112

Post by JoshTriplett »

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.

> They shouldn't have killed an excellent processor (the Alpha)

Parallel Alpha systems are a pain to deal with, because they lack a form of expected synchronization that every other processor has: automatic data dependency barriers. On every other platform, if you initialize or otherwise write to a value, then make a pointer point to that value, you can expect that anyone reading through that pointer gets the initialized/new value. But on Alpha, another CPU can get the new value of the pointer and then the uninitialized/old value of what it points to.

Alpha is the sole reason why the Linux kernel "smp_read_barrier_depends" barrier exists and code has to use it; on every other platform, that barrier is a no-op.

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

#113

Post by ghaff »

chx wrote: post #31

From almost exactly ten years ago: How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp > The MIPS chip, the DEC Alpha (perhaps the fastest chip of its era), and anything else in the pipeline were all cancelled or deemphasized. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it? > The failure of this chip to…

I'm not sure what point Dvorak is even making in that article. Yeah, a lot of ultimately wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64 plus a somewhat diminished set of CPUs from some of the big Unix vendors. It's an interesting question but I'm ultimately not sure that the computer industry would look all that different today had Intel just done 64-bit extensions to x86 or something similarly evolutionary.

AMD might well not exist. But, except for HP, the big Unix vendors mostly hedged their bets anyway. The large Japanese companies who also backed Itanium never were going to make the investments to break out beyond Japan.

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

#114

Post by djsumdog »

greglindahl wrote: post #29
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 a ton of innovation happening right now for machine-learning optimized ISAs. And RISC-V has excellent support for extensions. The funniest part of Itanium for me was that it was supposedly helpful to compilers. Yet the compiler people I knew did not like to use the "helpful" parts of the ISA. The loop unrolling stuff got in the way of software pipelining, for example. Mill is an example of a processor that's…

But it's not just compiler writing right? With long instruction words, you also have to write all the scheduling algorithms as well. I thought that was just something compiler authors didn't want to deal with.

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

#115

Post by Zardoz84 »

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.

Clipper! I didn't listen anything about Clipper since 90s

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

#116

Post by dorfsmay »

aeneasmackenzie wrote: post #69
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?

^W deletes the last word in readline.

In readline in emacs mode (yes you can switch deadline in vi mode)

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

#117

Post by ghaff »

rocky1138 wrote: post #63
ithkuil wrote: post #44

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

I was surprised to see this so far down the comments chain. What will OpenVMS do without Itanium?

As the parent indicates they're porting it to x86-64. I've been away from following HP proprietary systems for almost 10 years but they put a plan in place quite a while ago when it became obvious that Itanium had no future. Remember that systems in this space don't need to be the latest and greatest. They need a long support roadmap but it's mostly fine if hardware is on the older side.

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

#118

Post by greglindahl »

vbezhenar wrote: post #105
greglindahl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of innovation happening right now for machine-learning optimized ISAs. And RISC-V has excellent support for extensions. The funniest part of Itanium for me was that it was supposedly helpful to compilers. Yet the compiler people I knew did not like to use the "helpful" parts of the ISA. The loop unrolling stuff got in the way of software pipelining, for example. Mill is an example of a processor that's…

I wonder how did it happen? Intel has its own compiler, surely they could ask their compiler gurus to help with ISA design.

I don't know who they asked, but it's safe to say that compiler gurus are a diverse lot. The particular concern I mentioned (software pipelining) might not be something that the Intel compilers do.

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

#119

Post by greglindahl »

djsumdog wrote: post #114
greglindahl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of innovation happening right now for machine-learning optimized ISAs. And RISC-V has excellent support for extensions. The funniest part of Itanium for me was that it was supposedly helpful to compilers. Yet the compiler people I knew did not like to use the "helpful" parts of the ISA. The loop unrolling stuff got in the way of software pipelining, for example. Mill is an example of a processor that's…

But it's not just compiler writing right? With long instruction words, you also have to write all the scheduling algorithms as well. I thought that was just something compiler authors didn't want to deal with.

The high performance compilers I'm familiar with do a lot of worrying about instruction scheduling. Just because you've got an out-of-order processor doesn't mean it's effective to not bother with scheduling.

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

#120

Post by jandrese »

ghaff wrote: post #113
chx wrote: post #31

From almost exactly ten years ago: How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp > The MIPS chip, the DEC Alpha (perhaps the fastest chip of its era), and anything else in the pipeline were all cancelled or deemphasized. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it? > The failure of this chip to…

I'm not sure what point Dvorak is even making in that article. Yeah, a lot of ultimately wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64 plus a somewhat diminished set of CPUs from some of the big Unix vendors. It's an interesting question but I'm ultimately not sure that the computer industry would look all that different today had Intel just done 64-bit extensions to x86 or something similarly evolutio…

Blaming Itanium for killing all of the bespoke RISC processors from the 90s is a stretch IMHO. Low cost high power x86 architecture chips were a much bigger factor. Nobody had the stomach to pay $70k (plus $20k/year for the mandatory support contract) for a "workstation" that was slower than a $4k PC, especially once Linux got good.

Intel's good luck and heavy investment in shrinking node sizes also made it impossible for niche companies to keep up. They were doomed to be slow power hogs in their attempt to keep up with commodity x86 processors.

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