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

141–150 of 211 posts

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

#141

Post by abecedarius »

microcolonel wrote: post #139
emXdem wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And EFI is a good thing, especially considering the monster dumpster fire that is UEFI?

> And EFI is a good thing, especially considering the monster dumpster fire that is UEFI? Well it may be a dumpster fire, but it is the finest, most consistent flame we've gotten from the firmware dumpster; which is why it is fast becoming the only standard firmware interface in actual use . UEFI is fast becoming the standard for ARMv8, it's creeping back to ARMv7, and it's becoming popular with RISC-V. You will eith…

Not that I've ever coded firmware, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware sounded nice.

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

#142

Post by blattimwind »

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.

Dynamic instruction reordering allows higher performance for a lot of real-world code than static instruction scheduling.

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

#143

Post by kjs3 »

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…

Mill is/was nothing but performance art, and apparently is now dead. Proof of this is unlike 1-2 years ago, this thread isn't full of the Mill-shills telling you how Mill would solve all the problems the idiots who developed things like Itanic didn't, but faster, cheaper and with more style.

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

#144

Post by kjs3 »

classichasclass wrote: post #18
tyingq wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it mu…

Interesting. I've been an AIX dweeb since 3.2.5 and it's actually my favourite proprietary Unix mostly because it's so ornery. I still have a POWER6 running it that handles most of my web and mail tasks. In fact, I tend to develop on it since if it works on AIX it will be portable enough to work other places. That said, I like xlc performance but I despise its weird command line options. I mostly just use gcc on AIX…

Yeah...AIX is industrial strength. Unfortunately, lots of people really want 'run in my parents basement strength'.

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

#145

Post by acdha »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #46
skynetv2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hand-written code for Itanium was always smoking fast. One-clock microkernel message passes and other insanity. But nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine.

Most of it depended on the problem: for a subset of problems it worked well but once you had branchy code and less than very consistent memory access it was dismal. I supported a computational science group during that period and Itanium (and Cell) kept being tested but never made sense since you’d be looking at person-years of work hoping you could beat the current systems (or even previous generation) instead of spending that time on improved application functionality.

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

#146

Post by zaphirplane »

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…

I wonder what the future of hpux is? Tried to search but couldn’t find anything other than future plans to run hpux as a Linux container which sounds like marketing since hpux isn’t something to run as a Linux container

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

#147

Post by Gracana »

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.

Fun story: up until a couple years ago, my employer ran the entire company (manufacturing) with software running on a PA-RISC mainframe. I wish I could have taken that machine home when they took it offline.

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

#148

Post by TheCondor »

pjscott wrote: post #125
lscotte wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes back way further than that - probably to the dawn of IRC or so.

I believe it dates back to the unix talk(1) program, quite a bit earlier than IRC.

It’s from the dec terminal emulation, VT100. I think specifically when you connected to like an ansi type system with dec mode. Or something like that, the memories are fuzzy

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

#149

Post by zozbot123 »

acdha wrote: post #145
shereadsthenews wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hand-written code for Itanium was always smoking fast. One-clock microkernel message passes and other insanity. But nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine.

Most of it depended on the problem: for a subset of problems it worked well but once you had branchy code and less than very consistent memory access it was dismal. I supported a computational science group during that period and Itanium (and Cell) kept being tested but never made sense since you’d be looking at person-years of work hoping you could beat the current systems (or even previous generation) instead of sp…

> for a subset of problems it worked well but once you had branchy code and less than very consistent memory access it was dismal.

So, a lot like coding for the GPU. Makes sense, given that the low-level architecture is so similar... And it might explain why VLIW itself is not so widely used anymore. AIUI, even the Mill proposed architecture (which boils down to VLIW + lots of tricks to cheaply improve performance on typical workloads) has a hardware-dependent, low-level "compilation" step that's quite reminiscent of what a GPU driver has to do.

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

#150

Post by microcolonel »

abecedarius wrote: post #141
microcolonel wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And EFI is a good thing, especially considering the monster dumpster fire that is UEFI? Well it may be a dumpster fire, but it is the finest, most consistent flame we've gotten from the firmware dumpster; which is why it is fast becoming the only standard firmware interface in actual use . UEFI is fast becoming the standard for ARMv8, it's creeping back to ARMv7, and it's becoming popular with RISC-V. You will eith…

Not that I've ever coded firmware, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware sounded nice.

Open Firmware was beautiful, but if you're not on POWER, you're probably not going to see it.
Post reply on HN