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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

#101

Post by justin66 »

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.

> Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the future.

It was quite a bit worse than that. If you ignore the horror of IBM vendor lock-in, which in retrospect made the whole thing untenable, and the overpriced nature of the systems, MCA was a fine thing for its time. The PS/2s had some nice features. They were compatible with everyone's DOS and Windows stuff, even if IBM would have preferred you use OS/2, and so on.

Itanium was a piece of crap, even if you could somehow ignore the cost and lock-in.

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

#102

Post by chasil »

rediguanayum wrote: post #98

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…

I wonder how ARM, so relatively late with AArch64, was able to compel Fujitsu to take the instruction set to the heights of the top-performing supercomputer.

I understand that there are exotic addressing modes involved. I'm not versed enough to understand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)

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

#103

Post by photonerd »

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]

Wait until you learn about the oil industry…

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

#104

Post by usr1106 »

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.

Exactly. The year of the ARM server has been predicted for more than 10 years. (Only topped by the year of the Linux desktop, but the latter has probably just been a joke most of the time anyway.)

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

#105

Post by o11c »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #77
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…

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.

Alpha was unequivocally terrible though. "Better than Itanium" is really not saying much.

* no byte operations

* no flags, thus no reasonable way to check for overflow (similar to one of the problems RISC-V is having, though at least they pretend to care).

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

#106

Post by usr1106 »

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)

I have also used a Tandem (probaby even a couple of years before the Cyclone came). But I wouldn't want one today before someone ports Linux to it :)

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

#107

Post by anarazel »

vgatherps wrote: post #87
usrusr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For GPUs it only really works because the code is translated to the relevant instruction steam close to the time of executing, where you can afford to optimize in a highly uarch specific way. Whereas VLIW at the time of itanium never was in that position... It just doesn't compute for me how Intel thought this was a good plan. It's not like they didn't know that existing compiled binaries are going to continue being used on newer uarchs

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

#108

Post by usr1106 »

jl6 wrote: post #8

The latest 9700 models from 2017 are still in support until 2025!

I am surprised that there was still a new processor in 2017. I would have guessed it died nearly 20 years earlier. (I have used computers since more than 10 years before the Itaniun came out, or if you count the year of their release, 30 years older ones. But I never came even close to any Itanium.)

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

#109

Post by faeriechangling »

usr1106 wrote: post #104
tremon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. The year of the ARM server has been predicted for more than 10 years. (Only topped by the year of the Linux desktop, but the latter has probably just been a joke most of the time anyway.)

The year of the linux desktop has been such a long prevailing joke that when the Linux desktop took over the education market nobody paid attention and people keep making YOTLD jokes.

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

#110

Post by spockz »

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.

Hetzner also has ARM servers you can order. Also on GCS: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/arm-on-compu...
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