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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

#161

Post by butterisgood »

drewg123 wrote: post #61
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.

Indeed. I have to admit that as a DEC alpha user starting in 1993 (using OSF/1), and also one of the main FreeBSD/alpha port authors, the itanium being phased out fills me with joy.

Sadly, it won't bring the Alpha back.

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

#162

Post by yuubi »

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.

Not emacs (it means kill-region there, which deletes the text between the cursor and the mark and saves it in a holding area, fairly close to what windows does when you hit ^x, except the holding area is fancier).

This readline behavior follows a Unix tty driver. I'm not sure off the top of my head which one introduced it. I don't think it was on xenix but am pretty sure some 4.x bsd had it.

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

#163

Post by InclinedPlane »

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.

The people who built the Alpha went on to work at AMD and built the Athlon. Most of the innovations in that platform ended up filtering into the Intel Core 2 and Core i7 architecture as well.

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

#164

Post by InclinedPlane »

Itanium represents a classic case of jumping architectures and committing too soon. Any mature system represents not just the sum of a huge amount of design work but also an untold number of hours (years really) of beta testing, bug fixing, and iterative refinement. A new system may be built on a better foundation but more often than not in its immature state it will still have shortcomings until it's been through a long period of "burn-in" and bug fixing.

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

#165

Post by ethbro »

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.

I think that's close to a truism of system design: the more things you simultaneously require a developer to be an expert at to use your system, the fewer developers who will choose to use your system.

Somewhere around 3 disciplines? Nobody's using your system.

Such was the paradoxical brilliance of SQL and Excel. By limiting knowledge scope, they greatly enhanced utilization (and thereby utility).

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

#166

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #99
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

Clickable link: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.html

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

#167

Post by ip26 »

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?

Maybe you're a few years from retirement and your core skillset is itanium. Maybe you just need a paycheck. It was developed and maintained in many locales, including ones without a lot of alternative employment choices for an architect or vlsi designer.

I've met lots of engineers who are deeply passionate, but I've also met plenty for whom it's really just a job.

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

#168

Post by int_19h »

classichasclass wrote: post #94
Twirrim wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It also seems to be popular for countries playing catch-up on that whole "we can make our own computers from grounds up" metric - both China and Russia make their own MIPS CPUs, mostly for military use at the moment.

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

#169

Post by MagicPropmaker »

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…

Actually, it's been a very exciting time for "CPUs" if you include "GPUs". The programming I can do in CUDA on an NVIDIA GPU is incredible. (Our company is using it for large-scale audio processing.) You can get a true Supercomputer on your desk now for $1,000 -- something that would have been the fastest computer in the world 15 years ago.

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

#170

Post by chx »

ghaff wrote: post #131
codinger wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X86-64/AMD64 was solely developed by AMD and licensed to Intel. I'm stating this because I can't tell what you mean by: "wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64"

Intel was independently developing 64-bit extensions under the code name Yamhill. I know there some legal settlements around the time so they may have cross-licensed technology. AMD came out first but Intel had much the same thing in its back pocket. What I last statement meant was we ended up by an industry dominated by 64-bit x86 anyway in spite of all the effort that went into an alternative 64-bit architecture. S…

What ...? Yamhill was an answer to AMD64. The first rumors appeared in 2002 where AMD announced AMD64 in 1999, released the full specs in 2000 and actually shipped the first Opteron CPU in 2003 April, Intel shipped the Nocona in June 2004. This trailing remained for a while -- LAHF/SAHF in 64 bit was shipped in March 2005 by AMD but only December 2005 by Intel.
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