Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

phoronix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 220 posts

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

#31

Post by FullyFunctional »

rasz wrote: post #15
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.

It was only the future until release date forced it to face the reality. Linus Torvalds in 2003: https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/x86.html >Itanium 2 doesn't hold a candle to a P4 on any real-world benchmarks.

Hilariously, it must be read in the context that Linus actually hated the P4 for it's very imbalanced performance.

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

#33

Post by kstrauser »

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.

In this case, that means AMD showing up with the first x86-compatible 64-bit CPUs killed Itanium dead. For big software projects already running on x86, there were 2 options:

- Port everything to a new architecture that only looked good in specific benchmarks, cross your fingers, and hope for the best.

- Keep running your code on new 64-bit CPUs that were backward compatible with your existing code, then recompile for 64-bit as you got around to it.

As a bonus, amd64/x86-64 CPUs were faster than the P4 chips that practically needed 3 phase power to boot up.

It was kind of a no brainer.

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

#34

Post by GrilledChips »

failuser wrote: post #32

The worst thing about Itanium is that it killed DEC Alpha, high-performance MIPS and some other arches I keep forgetting about.

It's kind of funny. There are lots of architectures it killed (Alpha, PA-RISC, basically everything except SPARC because Sun was sceptical) but basically all of them have outlived it in the linux kernel.

It killed their manufacturing based on hype, where as they all established a firm install base before itanium ever got rolling, which has ensured they continue to be (halfheartedly) maintained.

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

#36

Post by flashback2199 »

twoodfin wrote: post #21
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…

> 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.

Oh but they did :)

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

#37

Post by bombcar »

twoodfin wrote: post #21
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…

I think it's the case that they wanted to believe that, because the other story, that all the major "big iron" companies would be absolutely and totally forever wrecked by stupid free Linux running on stupid cheap whiteboxes was simply too horrible to envision.

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

#38

Post by GrilledChips »

postmodest wrote: post #5
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.

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!!!

Sun was one of the few processor makers who were sceptical and decided to wait and see before cancelling plans for their architecture, and it's nice to hear that worked out for them for a bit before 64-bit x86 ate their lunch.

Of course, it's also possible that by that point Sun was already paralysed by infighting between various splinter groups, with no big bad DEC to fight against.

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

#39

Post by GrilledChips »

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…

It wasn't the cost of alpha. It was the bleeding all through the rest of the company.

DEC's terminals? killed by PCs. The VAX lineup? killed by RISC chips, and the VAX 9000 consumed a huge chunk of their cash reserves before embarrassingly being rendered obsolete by their own NVAX.

This was a time of change from minicomputers to microcomputers and DEC made costly decision after costly decision. They kept selling off profitable "non-core" portions of the business that in the process incurred a loss.

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

#40

Post by MarkSweep »

the_panopticon wrote: post #26

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...

Another thing created for Itanium that outlived it is the Itanium C++ ABI:

https://itanium-cxx-abi.github.io/cxx-abi/abi.html

My understanding is this was first created for Itanium but is now used for other architectures.

Post reply on HN