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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

#81

Post by 0xDEADFED5 »

tremon wrote: post #73
dixie_land wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't my area of expertise, I'm sure others on here can rattle off more names, but at the very least Oracle has ARM servers available (the free ones are decent for hobby stuff) and Hetzner has ARM servers available

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

#82

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

dvaletin wrote: post #18

Why it took so long?

With the possible exception of darwin, all the major operating systems are fairly careful about maintaining backwards compatibility. They've certainly been making noises about cutting support for a long time, but it's not surprising that they were very deliberate about doing it for real.

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

#83

Post by lallysingh »

tremon wrote: post #73
dixie_land wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AWS and other cloud providers are major, major, major buyers. They have a lot of influence in the CPU market.

ARM is cheaper and the performance hit is smaller than the savings. For scalable workloads you can easily just run more ARM and save money. Also, a lot (lot) of workloads are memory or I/O bound so the performance hit is negligible. ARM has gotten pretty optimized in both the CPU architecture and the tooling thanks to mobile uses.

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

#84

Post by cy384 »

sillywalk wrote: post #78
cy384 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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

nope, I just like weird computers and distributed systems, itanium is possibly the weirdest CPU architecture that modern linux can run on, and SGI is an interesting part of computer history.

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

#85

Post by 1letterunixname »

Pour one out for blind faith in Transmeta (which Linus also was involved with) Crusoe-like VLIW, complicated compilers, and Rolls-Royce grand designs with almost 500 registers. Enterprise will buy anything if it's expensive enough, right?

Perhaps VLIW should've been proven workable and advantageous with realistic modeling first before betting billions in development.

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

#86

Post by BirAdam »

bitwize wrote: post #24
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 s…

Well, zero speculation would have saved from all of the exploits over the years… so there’s that.

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

#87

Post by vgatherps »

usrusr wrote: post #69
cbmuser wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Itanium was killed because unlike all the other architectures it puts a rather big burden on upstream developers due its complicated design (dual stack with growth into two directions, complicated compiler optimizations etc).

I keep wondering if it perhaps simply appeared too early. These days it feels as if almost everything is either open source or runs in some form of JIT compile VM, or both. Back then it was a huge problem to require code to be compiled not just to the general architecture but to the specific model to be fast. But today? Moving some of the adaptions from the hardware scheduler to process lifetime persistence (as in JI…

It would probably be even worse today. Dynamically discovering ILP “just works” even as memory gets slower and slower and slower. A CPU today can execute hundreds of instructions and many predicted branches ahead of a slow load. It would be impossible to statically schedule this (you don’t know what will/won’t be in cache), and difficult to try and hoist all loads 100 instructions in advance especially when you take branching behavior into account.

GPUs have taken over much of the niche where these processors excel, number crunching where you have entirely pre-determined memory / compute access patterns.

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

#88

Post by [deleted] »

MBCook wrote: post #44
duskwuff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. :)

The motorcar is a fad! Surely after 115 years it will be over!

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

ethbr1 wrote: post #61
eigenvalue wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd love to hear someone chip in with what it takes to make a solar panel and the rate limiting factors. E.g. if a solar panel factory (simplifying into a single entity) already exists, is there any reason not to run it at 100% production capacity? What consumables are used?

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by genmud »

cbmuser wrote: post #48
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!)

[flagged]

This makes their modeling errors even more egregious and embarrassing. If you know governments are subsidizing it, and there are no foreseeable plans to cut said subsidies, you would be a fool to not forecast growth.
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