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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

#71

Post by ironhaven »

eigenvalue wrote: post #55
tux3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

In this situation I would assume that the political/internal pressures from the member companies and advisory board were dominating factors as opposed to the forecasters being total dummies. There must have been some reasons why it was not appealing to assume the growth could keep ramping like that. Because it’s an obviously insane forecast after the first few data points are in.

It seems like the World Energy Outlook report the fossil fuel industry gets a lot of airtime. In the 2018 report[1] most of the sections are dedicated to oil and gas topic and the section on renewables is very skeptical on the viability of renewables.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2018/

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

#73

Post by tremon »

dixie_land wrote: post #62
jmyeet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lesson here. Intel basically wanted to get away from x86 because it was licensed to AMD (and Cyrix) due to an earlier (and essentially unlimited) licensing agreement. In the late 90s, the likes of DEC, HP and Sun ruled the server and workstation space. Intel wanted in on this space and didn't want AMD to be able to produce compatible parts so... enter EPIC [1]. The projections (as you point to) were wildly…

You seem very insightful on this topic. May I ask your opinion as to why ARM is taking off on the server market?

Is it? FAFAIK, the only places where ARM servers run is inside Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, and they design their own processors for that. The reason they chose ARM has to do with licensing, it has little to do with the characteristics of the processor architecture nor with processor performance.

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

#74

Post by spandextwins »

That thing was such an abomination, good riddance. Not sure what the heck HP and intel were thinking, yeah, have the compiler do the work of ordering instructions particularly crafty so it wouldn't stall. HP had PA-RISC at the time, maybe it was an effort to kill Intel?

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

#75

Post by hakfoo »

dixie_land wrote: post #62
jmyeet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lesson here. Intel basically wanted to get away from x86 because it was licensed to AMD (and Cyrix) due to an earlier (and essentially unlimited) licensing agreement. In the late 90s, the likes of DEC, HP and Sun ruled the server and workstation space. Intel wanted in on this space and didn't want AMD to be able to produce compatible parts so... enter EPIC [1]. The projections (as you point to) were wildly…

You seem very insightful on this topic. May I ask your opinion as to why ARM is taking off on the server market?

My two cents: Open source displaced a lot of propriatery stacks.

When you're running commercial software at $$$$ per license, the customers basically have to stick to whatever hardware is explicitly supported. And the vendors are going to be narrow there. Fewer platforms keep support costs down, and prevent exposure to uncompetitive corners of the market. As long as $expensive_product is only officially supported for x86, nobody needs to know it's riotously unperformant on ARM in ways that will require wholesale rewrites to fix.

When it's all open stuff, nothing stops people from compiling it for ARM, RISC-V, and hell 65C816, letting the market choose which platform fits their needs best. For many audiences it might not be "maximum performance under cost-no-object hardware"; it might be "what's the cheapest way to serve a fixed N workload units per month, when you include the purchase cost, electricity cost, rack-space rental cost, etc."

As a second-order effect, I expect removing license cost from the equation also impacts the metrics people care about. When the software price is the dominant aspect of the bill, nobody's going to make much of a case of "we can save 55 of the annual cost up front by using cheaper good-enough hardware" or "we'll save 1% per month on the energy bill".

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

#76

Post by riffraff »

mahkeiro wrote: post #43
tux3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

Especially funny when you know that the figure for 2022 is 320GW which is completely off this chart!

Were the post 2018 projections still this wrong? I'd love to see an updated chart

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

#77

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jmyeet wrote: post #60
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_...

There's a lesson here. Intel basically wanted to get away from x86 because it was licensed to AMD (and Cyrix) due to an earlier (and essentially unlimited) licensing agreement. In the late 90s, the likes of DEC, HP and Sun ruled the server and workstation space. Intel wanted in on this space and didn't want AMD to be able to produce compatible parts so... enter EPIC [1]. The projections (as you point to) were wildly…

Alpha would have been such a better path to follow, and Intel even ended up with a license for it because of Compaq/HP's incompetence.

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

#78

Post by sillywalk »

cy384 wrote: post #19
reidacdc wrote: post #6

On 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…

numalink, 1.6GB/s in 2003! there's an altix 3000 on ebay that I'm kinda tempted by https://www.ebay.com/itm/174917876903 it only runs like one specific version of suse or red hat

I've always wanted an Indy or an O2,but other than running the demos, I don't know what I'd do with them. Also, high-end kit is also interesting, but again, I kind of want an Altix (or Origin 2000/3000), or .AS/400 or a Tandem Cyclone.. just because it's neat.

Do you have anything specific you'd do with an Altix 3000?

(I don't mean to sound snooty)

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

#79

Post by candiddevmike »

dixie_land wrote: post #62
jmyeet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lesson here. Intel basically wanted to get away from x86 because it was licensed to AMD (and Cyrix) due to an earlier (and essentially unlimited) licensing agreement. In the late 90s, the likes of DEC, HP and Sun ruled the server and workstation space. Intel wanted in on this space and didn't want AMD to be able to produce compatible parts so... enter EPIC [1]. The projections (as you point to) were wildly…

You seem very insightful on this topic. May I ask your opinion as to why ARM is taking off on the server market?

ARM servers can be made relatively cheaply (especially if you own an ARM server company like AWS), and they use less power (and cooling, I believe). So in a data center they're cheaper for the same functionality, kinda.

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

#80

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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.

I can. The x86 hegemony was overpowering in the PC space but the moment you left that corner of the market we had a lot more ISA diversity then than in the following years. In a world that seemed to have no problem with Macs on PowerPC, PCs on x86, and workstations/servers on SPARC/MIPS/PA-RISC, just consolidating workstations and servers probably seemed reasonable. You can even see an analog in the way we've kept x86 on "real computers" while ARM has dominated mobile. IMHO the only reason it didn't work out is because workstations and servers merged with PCs.

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