Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
1–10 of 220 posts
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#2It's funny thinking back to the hype cycle of Itanium back in the heady days where performance was doubling every year, desktop was king and this was the future.
Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the future.
Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always.
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#3It's funny thinking back to the hype cycle of Itanium back in the heady days where performance was doubling every year, desktop was king and this was the future . Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the future. Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always.
2009 summary https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp
> The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel—and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level.
> It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above. The next level was the basement, in fact. Hopefully Intel won't come up with any more bright ideas like the Itanium. We can't afford to excavate another level down.
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#4It's funny thinking back to the hype cycle of Itanium back in the heady days where performance was doubling every year, desktop was king and this was the future . Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the future. Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always.
2009 summary https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp > The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel—and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level. > It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above.…
This piece sounds like a lot of misrepresentation and exaggeration.
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#5It's funny thinking back to the hype cycle of Itanium back in the heady days where performance was doubling every year, desktop was king and this was the future . Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the future. Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always.
As someone working in that space at that time, IA64 was still losing to Sparc64 the entire time. We would do big boxes on Solaris and replace older Sun boxes with ia32 Pentium Pros. There wasn't really ever a point at which we thought "hm, RISC isn't working for us, we need VLIW" ...and we were an HP shop!!!
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#6On the one hand, I am not surprised -- at my workplace, we only ever had one Itanium system, an SGI Altix 3000-series computer. It was kind of niche even when we bought it, and core-for-core, the Itanium CPUs were slower than their competitors. What the SGI was really good at was MPI parallelism. I don't know how much of that was the CPU and how much was the overall system design of the Altix, which featured a pretty amazing interconnection fabric (CrayLink, I think?), and cache-coherency and a sophisticated memory model. But not all problems parallelized well, so the system ended up kind of being this weird outlier that was a good answer to some classes of problems, but you had to remember it existed.
On the other hand, it's a bit of a shame to formally, officially lose another option out of the computing ecosystem.
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#7Previous discussion from a few days ago:
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#8The latest 9700 models from 2017 are still in support until 2025!
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#9It's funny thinking back to the hype cycle of Itanium back in the heady days where performance was doubling every year, desktop was king and this was the future . Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the future. Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always.
I still get confused whether the real name is Itanium or Itanic
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#10On the one hand, I am not surprised -- at my workplace, we only ever had one Itanium system, an SGI Altix 3000-series computer. It was kind of niche even when we bought it, and core-for-core, the Itanium CPUs were slower than their competitors. What the SGI was really good at was MPI parallelism. I don't know how much of that was the CPU and how much was the overall system design of the Altix, which featured a pretty…
[deleted]