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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

#111

Post by ksec »

jpleger wrote: post #95
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 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…

There were plenty of people sceptical of Itanium at the time, including many within Intel as well. I guess we all gave Intel some benefits of the doubt. But the great thing is that the whole industry learned a lot from it. Intel did too. It is just sad a lot of this learning experience within Engineering never got promoted to C-Level Management at Intel.

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

#112

Post by icelancer »

faeriechangling wrote: post #109
usr1106 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think about this from time to time. The Linux desktop is actually here in huge sectors of the market and no one cares. They displaced Apple in education due to expense and Apple finally hitting escape velocity (and thus can price their goods at whatever they want), so you see a ton of Ubuntu/Mint/etc desktop cheap machines in schools that run web browsers and OpenOffice (but mostly the former).

It's pretty funny.

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

#113

Post by RedShift1 »

lallysingh wrote: post #83
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.

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 toolin…

Is ARM cheaper? A few weeks ago I needed a small VM in the Google Cloud and the smallest ARM machine cost the same as the smallest x86 machine.

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

#114

Post by ksec »

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?

Not OP. And frankly speaking what he said should be common knowledge for those who lived through that period.

AArch64 and AMD64 has more in common than Itanium which is a bag of hurt from hardware to compiler.

ARM on Server actually saves money at the scale being deployed, while Itanium has zero cost advantage, and that is before adding the cost of software which was order of magnitude worst than any estimate had made at the time.

Most Server software operate on Open Source software. From Linux to Nginx, MySQL, Postgres, Memcache or Redis and tons and tons OSS. Which makes changes far easier than waiting for vendor to support AArch64.

AArach64 has a much bigger market to fine tune its software stack and toolchain from Smartphones. There are currently 4.5+Billion of Smartphone in uses, that is larger than all the x86 usage in the world. Compare that to IA64 /Itanium.

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

#115

Post by sillywalk »

usr1106 wrote: post #106
sillywalk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I've never used a Tandem (or as/400 or sgi) myself. Just find all of them interesting.

I assume Porting Linux to the pre-MIPS Tandem line would be a challenge. The Proprietary CPU was 'stack based' and very different from x86. Also, I don't know if Tandem ever sold compilers to do the sort of 'low level' system stuff to port another OS..

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

#117

Post by cptskippy »

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…

Thank you, people usually miss the importance of Banias and Centrino.

Banias was the Israeli team asking how do we make an incredibly efficient mobile CPU and the answer was finish your work quickly and go to sleep.

In order to finish quickly, you had to be fast and efficient. Someone said well what if we don't actually go to sleep?

IIRCC, Core was a combination of the Banias CPU architecture, an evolution of P3, combined with the Netburst bus architecture from P4.

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

#118

Post by jenadine »

MarkSweep wrote: post #40
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.

If I remember correctly, intel published a spec for the C++ ABI for uranium and GCC decided to use that on all architectures and OS to simplify the implementation. (This was at a time were GCC was still breaking frequently the ABI from version to version) When llvm came out, it tried to be compatible with GCC. As a result, given the prevalence of GCC, the Itanium ABI is now used almost everywhere. The notable exception is the Microsoft Visual compiler (MSVC) who still has its own API.

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

#119

Post by adrianN »

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?

Solar panels are just doped silicon, some wiring and support frames.

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

#120

Post by callalex »

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…

> your desire to lock out competition doesn't necessarily translate to something customers actually want or need

For the sake of humanity, we need to crowdfund a blimp with this quote that just flies back and forth between Cupertino/Mountain View and San Mateo for the next 5 or 10 years.

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