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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

#131

Post by fulafel »

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…

I hadn't heard about compiler vs 432 before, any links?

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

#132

Post by fulafel »

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

There have been successful VLIWs in eg GPUs and mobile basebands. Ie in apps that don't have the software inertia of needing to run existing CPU code. Parallel unfriendly C/C++ semantics is the killer.

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

#133

Post by somat »

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...

No that's a bad thing. we could of had openfirmware.

Sort of a half joke, I can see no way OFW could have made the jump to the pc world.

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

#134

Post by pjmlp »

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…

The lesson here is that AMD should not have been allowed access to Intel's IP, that is what allowed them in first place to undermine Intel's Itanium plans.

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

#135

Post by logbiscuitswave »

In the mid 2000s I had to test a product I was working on with all architectures supported by Windows, which of course included ia64. We had one engineering sample HP ia64 machine in the test lab (I think it was a zx2000 but I could be mistaken). It was this giant, noisy, hulking boat anchor full tower that weighed some over 50 lbs and had a 650W power supply.

I had to find a Server 2003 ia64 CD to install the OS (and work through the awful UEFI CLI incantations required to get the damn thing to boot). Once installed I was always struck by just how incredibly slow the machine was. It was just such a drag to use. Once we no longer needed to support ia64 I was thrilled that I’d never need to use that thing again.

Good riddance.

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

#136

Post by __d »

RedShift1 wrote: post #113
lallysingh wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not cheaper for you, it's cheaper for them.

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

#137

Post by the_why_of_y »

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]

The governments have to subsidize solar, so it can compete with government subsidized fossil fuels. You may be surprised to learn that global fossil fuel subsidies rose from $4.5 trillion in 2015 to $7 trillion in 2022.

https://www.statista.com/chart/31016/volume-of-global-fossil...

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

#138

Post by xbmcuser »

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?

They are running at full capacity. Chinese factories will produce more panels this year than what was the total world solar install 5 years ago. The problem today is not supply of solar but demand it faces similar problems as chip manufacturing as once new capacity is brought up the world needs time to train more workers as well produce equipment to use that capacity

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

#139

Post by jmyeet »

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?

None of this is my area of expertise. I’m just old enough to have lived through this era and remember what happened.

Many people don’t realize ARM can trace its origins back to the BBC Micro. For a variety of reasons it found a niche in low power applications, even 30+ years ago. ARM, the company, simply sells licenses without producing its own silicon. There’s concern now with it going public that it will seek revenue by jacking up licensing costs.

It’s mobile devices where ARM flourished and entered public consciousness. There used to be other platforms but they died off. Intel sold XScale years ago because of a lack of vision.

ARM processors got sufficiently powerful to be in servers and power efficiency became a big deal. Google really transformed this space with sub-1.1 PUEs when no one outside even believed that was possible. Performance per Watt became a really big deal.

Also, I’m not sure if this is entirely fair but I credit Apple with a lot of ARM’s success. They bought a company called PA Semi and pushed the envelope with what ARM can do. I think that may have been the best $400 million (IIRC) ever spent.

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

#140

Post by jnsaff2 »

adrianN wrote: post #119
ethbr1 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Silicon for solar panels has to be 99.999999 percent pure—six 9s after the decimal. Computer chips are even more demanding. Their silicon needs to be 99.99999999999 percent pure—eleven 9s.
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