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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

#91

Post by JohnBooty »

spandextwins wrote: post #74

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?

    yeah, have the compiler do the work of ordering 
    instructions particularly crafty so it wouldn't stall
Obviously it was a disaster, but it didn't/doesn't sound like it is necessarily a bad idea.

A ridiculous percentage of a modern CPU's transistor count (and design complexity) is devoted to speculative execution and other "smarts" that intel proposed shifting to the compiler. Which theoretically lets you ditch all that speculative execution hardware in the CPU and spend it on more badass cool performance stuff. Theoretically.

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

#92

Post by arcticbull »

ethbr1 wrote: post #63
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…

I've still got a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 Northwood squirreled away somewhere. The machine it originally ran in is humming away too, albeit with a replacement Pentium M using a socket 478 adapter. I keep it as a reminder that even billions of dollars can't see around the future corner.

Fun fact: the Pentium M you put in is the actual predecessor to modern Core processors - not the Pentium 4 you took out of the socket.

The NetBurst microarchitecture of Pentium 4 was killed off and a 64-bit version of the P6 Variant Enhanced Pentium M microarchitecture took the baton.

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

#94

Post by deaddodo »

akuma73 wrote: post #64
chasil wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it might sound contrarian, Alpha actually deserved to die. It guzzled power. This was the biggest problem, not solvable in its lifetime with its resources. "According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM

A lot of ex-Alpha engineers went to PA-Semi which Apple then acquired. Those people are responsible for the epic custom Apple ARM CPUs.

A lot of the Alpha engineers (including Keller) went to AMD and made the Athlon. The Athlon (K7/K8, specifically) was/is considered the spiritual successor to the 21264, by many. But yeah, many ended up looping around to PA Semi (again, including Keller).

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

#95

Post by jpleger »

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…

I worked on a large scale project that was itanium based and let me tell you, the compilers / software toolchains were an absolute dumpster fire. We were planning on being between 500 and 2000 processors in our cluster.

We used HP boxes and I want to say it was around 2002/2003 when this was going on. We were supposed to be a huge public showpiece client for both intel and HP. It… did not go very well. I remember the absolute defeated looks of the HP / Intel people when we pulled the plug and told them the discounts / free hardware still couldn’t justify the engineering efforts we had gone through for the last 18-24 months. This was right as opterons were coming out and that project jumped ship to them.

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

#96

Post by deaddodo »

chasil wrote: post #57
initplus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same company that completely missed the boat on mobile not that many years later. Intel have consistently made serious mistakes in their strategic direction. Fumbling 64bit, turning Apple down on mobile, missing GPU/AI. They are basically just building a better version of the same product they were selling 20 years ago… so much opportunity missed here.

You mean this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200

I think they're referring to the Core/Penryn series (the "direct" ancestor to modern Intel x86s).

But even that goes back to the P6->P5->486->386->286->8086->8088->8080->8008->CTC lineage of 50+yrs. It literally just cuts out the few years of the abandoned NetBurst architecture.

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

#97

Post by quux »

IAmLiterallyAB wrote: post #93

I really like the idea of VLIW CPUs, it's a shame none of them have worked out. Does anyone know of any other cool more modern CPU designs? Stuff like RISCV is fine but doesn't feel particularly innovative

The mill architecture has interesting ideas but as far as I know it’s never made it past simulation and there hasn’t been much progress lately. https://millcomputing.com/

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

#98

Post by rediguanayum »

The chip designers back then were focussed (micro-)instructions per clock (IPC), and everyone knew that RISC and CISC were going to hit a wall due to the ALU bypass network. A this is pretty true, they did, to this day, with some incremental improvements. Folks hoped that VLIW and advanced compilers would take us to the next level of IPC. What they didn't realize was that Itanium wasn't a true VLIW, and had that same ALU bypass network, hence couldn't scale up width and frequency as promised. But a true VLIW would have been very hard to work with. Perhaps Transmeta's approach could have worked if that technology was pushed by a a larger, more resourced company.

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

#100

Post by bombcar »

twoodfin wrote: post #46
bombcar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Data center computing being dominated by commodity Linux running on commodity x86 PC architecture—for which the best CPUs were not commodities, but rather made exclusively by Intel—was likely the best of all possible worlds for them! Going back to at least the i432, Intel seems to have had a deep vein of “mainframe envy” in their culture and strategic thinking. It seems that somehow the market (and a bit of trailblaz…

It was great for Intel - but it wasn't great for certain big manufacturers (dinosaurs) that they were courting.

I think they knew they could fall back on x86 if everything went wrong - but what they did NOT expect was x86-64 to just smash everything. That caught them on backfoot.

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