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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

#181

Post by Angostura »

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.

In days of yore the joke was always ^H^H after IBM/DEC backspace v delete confusion

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

#182

Post by gaius »

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.

Intel has its own compiler, surely they could ask their compiler gurus to help with ISA design.

Well that kinda was the concept - but they greatly underestimated the difficulty of producing a "sufficiently smart compiler". If VLIW had worked it would have greatly simplified processor design, no (or at least much less) need to worry about cleverly handling out-of-order execution for example. That in turn would have meant e.g. bigger L1 caches because you would have the die space to play with, or more execution units, or whatever.

It didn't work out and Intel did make some stupid decisions along the way (also underestimating the importance of backwards compatibility with existing code - not only binaries, but you also needed to be able to compile existing source well) but it was worth a punt, and maybe will be again someday - maybe a DL-based compiler could produce good VLIW code? Maybe a new (or old) language will be more amenable to VLIW compilation than C?

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

#183

Post by pjmlp »

gaius wrote: post #182
vbezhenar wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Intel has its own compiler, surely they could ask their compiler gurus to help with ISA design. Well that kinda was the concept - but they greatly underestimated the difficulty of producing a "sufficiently smart compiler". If VLIW had worked it would have greatly simplified processor design, no (or at least much less) need to worry about cleverly handling out-of-order execution for example. That in turn would have me…

> Maybe a new (or old) language will be more amenable to VLIW compilation than C?

I would say certainly, given Fran Allen's point of view on C compilers.

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

#184

Post by pjmlp »

glangdale wrote: post #154
max76 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be an awful waste of talent if it's just busy work.

The argument exists (I'm not saying it's true) that Google hoovers up the smartest people to stop them making another Google. People used to make the same argument about Microsoft.

I don't remember the source, so I might be making this up, I kind of remember Bill Gates stating that they would rather hire someone and keep them busy as letting them work for the competition.

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

#185

Post by pjmlp »

vinkelhake wrote: post #151
josteink wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be honest: the only reason Fuschia exists, is so Google can ship a Android-platform 100% free of GPL-code in the future. There’s nothing in it for anyone else.

How is Android limited by GPL?

GPL forces a certain level of contributions back to their authors, Apache and MIT (which Android uses) none at all.

Also, similarly to Apple, GCC just got removed from Android.

Only the kernel is left.

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

#186

Post by pjmlp »

lisper wrote: post #171
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…

> Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe designs possible IMHO, as someone who cares about security, that's not necessarily a bad thing. (I do lament the passing of tagged architectures, but that ship sailed a long, long time ago.)

That ship is back, although in smaller size, because tagged memory is the only way to actually tame C.

Solaris with SPARC ADI, Android with the upcoming ARM Memory Extensions are two examples of it.

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

#187

Post by pjmlp »

hakfoo wrote: post #157
ghaff wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 importan…

I can see the connection. Microsft was even more vulnerable there than Intel. If we switch from the "Every year the clock rate goes up 30%" model to "50% more cores every year", you're going to trigger the "recompile the universe" event. This is an esistential-level threat for the Microsoft of 15 years ago. Microsoft's biggest selling point for years was the backwards compatibility. Keep running that old software for…

Because not everyone is writing CLI POSIX apps in C and C++.

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

#188

Post by pjmlp »

tyingq wrote: post #12
neverartful wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of those proprietary systems were your favorite (or hated least) and why? Which did you dislike the most?

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…

One thing that always stayed with me is that they decided to follow up on Windows design for shared libraries and not what other UNIXes were doing.

So Aix was the only UNIX where I was using import libraries and having to explicitly export which symbols should have been public.

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

#189

Post by arnon »

It's interesting that it was actually AMD that kept the Intel x86-64 architecture alive.

Intel knew that the x86 architecture was limited in time, and tried to kill it off with the the 64-bit Itanium.

AMD had a different plan, and released 64-bit capable x86 processors, obstructing Intel’s plans to dominate with Itanium. I think this is key to why Itanium never caught on, and why writing software for it is so hard.

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

#190

Post by gaius »

pjmlp wrote: post #183
gaius wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has its own compiler, surely they could ask their compiler gurus to help with ISA design. Well that kinda was the concept - but they greatly underestimated the difficulty of producing a "sufficiently smart compiler". If VLIW had worked it would have greatly simplified processor design, no (or at least much less) need to worry about cleverly handling out-of-order execution for example. That in turn would have me…

> Maybe a new (or old) language will be more amenable to VLIW compilation than C? I would say certainly, given Fran Allen's point of view on C compilers.

A workflow I'd like to see: you write your code and ensure that it is functionally correct, all the tests pass. Then you go home and overnight, some ML/DL/NN whatever tool works on your code to find the best way to compile it (fastest binary that passes all tests). Repeat this every day for the duration of the project. At the end your artifacts are the source code, the shippable binary, and a model perfectly trained to produce the latter from the former. It's a shame that Itanic was too soon to take advantage of ML going mainstream.
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