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Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

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Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#21

Post by twoodfin »

jamiek88 wrote: post #2

It'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.

Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always.

I’m not particularly confused about Intel’s perspective on compatibility: Even at the time, there were several examples of successful platform CPU transitions across architectural “full breaks”. Apple going from 68k to PowerPC is the closest analogy for Intel, and if the Itanium performance and software (compiler) story had played out as Intel envisioned they likely would have been fine.

But as for ubiquity, I’m befuddled. As far as I’ve been able to determine—having lived through it and followed many retrospective threads like this looking for new evidence—Intel had no plans on any useful timeline to turn Itanium into a (non-workstation) desktop or laptop chip. Did they really think the market would stay bifurcated between “big iron” architectures and x86 personal machines for another decade? I can’t imagine they would have believed that.

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#22

Post by duskwuff »

tux3 wrote: post #16
pram wrote: post #11

The Itanium sales forecasts never fail to make me laugh. Aged like the finest wine: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...

Contrast with the notorious IAE solar forecast: https://zenmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/iea-vs-reality-... Statistics and modeling are complicated, granted. But when your model diverges from reality 5 years in a row, perhaps you should just extrapolate the current line next time around. (In the case of the Itanic, that would have been the line at 0. Still a better forecast than what they did!)

> Contrast with the notorious IAE solar forecast

"There's no way this level of growth can be sustainable."

"Surely we've hit a stable level by now."

"Maybe that last year was a fluke."

Love to see it. :)

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#23

Post by bitwize »

karmicthreat wrote: post #13

I had a manager that loved these things. He would shoe horn eBay one’s into any gambling backend he did. It was terrible, impossible to support and made accomplishing anything a chore. Rust in peace.

I don't think the Rust team is any more interested in supporting these...

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#24

Post by bitwize »

jamiek88 wrote: post #2

It'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.

Itanic was hype from the word go. Intel tried and failed twice to make "VLIW CPUs that rely on 'sufficiently smart' HLL compilers doing the right instruction packings" a thing before Itanium came along (iAPX 432 and i860). I think someone very high up at Intel was in love with the idea despite its repeated failures.

Alpha was clearly the future -- and Itanic ruined Alpha. We didn't even get to see it live on inside some other corporate sarlacc.

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#25

Post by vGPU »

chx wrote: post #3
jamiek88 wrote: post #2

It'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 reads like it was written by a discount version of chatGPT.

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#26

Post by the_panopticon »

As necessity is the mother of invention, Itanium did lead to UEFI, though

The Chicken and the Egg The very first effort that is considered a direct ancestor of UEFI technology had a very specific tactical goal. In the course of 1997 people at Intel were working on how to boot computers based on the prospective Itanium® Processor family...."

from https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#29

Post by FullyFunctional »

jabl wrote: post #20
chx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the DEC Alpha development stopped because of Merced (as it was called then) or because of the 1997 legal mess https://www.wired.com/1997/10/intel-dec-settle-alpha-chip-di... is quite hard to say. The DEC Alpha architecture was planned for 25 years and it certainly was not technical barriers that killed the Alpha 21464.

In the end it was market forces that did it in. Making new chips was (still is!) exponentially more expensive for each generation, and at the same time mass market chips were getting better and better while they could amortize the NRE costs over zillions of chips sold, eating the market from below. And other RISC competitors (and IA-64) were attacking from the sides. DEC just didn't have the customer base or depth of…

In my limited understanding two factors contributed significantly to Alpha failing. Business-wise, DEC and Ken Olesen were stuck in an old minicomputer mentality and wasn't sufficiently able or willing to "let it loose" and let it take over the market with DEC as the CPU supplier. Technically, Alpha development was taking longer and longer and the schedule slips got worse and worse.
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