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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

#171

Post by kalleboo »

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?

ARM allows anyone to license their cores and make their own CPUs. x86 has been limited to Intel and AMD. (before x86 took over there WAS a huge variety of CPU architectures in servers - Alpha, SPARC, HP-PA, POWER etc)

Starting a CPU company and selling CPUs to customers has always been difficult since you need to compete with other CPU packagers and Intel had the largest scale so could always put you out of business if you became a threat.

With the rise of big cloud server giants (AWS, Azure, Google), they can license the cores from ARM, build their own CPUs and cut out the middle-man. They are their own CPU customers so don't have to worry about building a market.

It's the rise of vertical integration from tech giants.

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

#172

Post by gbin »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #166
jmyeet wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two fun facts about DEC Alpha: 1. Windows NT, which is the ancestor of modern Windows, was originally released on multiple platforms including Alpha and, I believe, MIPS; and 2. DEC, for awhile at least, had one of the most popular Web search engines: AltaVista. It wasn’t a commercial enterprise. It was mostly a technology demonstration for Alpha. For the time it was pretty good. No one at this time (the 1990s) thoug…

When Windows NT and DEC is in the same message, may I suggest to mention that Windows NT is developed essentially by the DEC team.

I highly recommend watching the recent interview of Dave Cutler, it gives some perspective on that https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?si=D8_40BPga4Qj5jsW

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

#173

Post by xattt »

cptskippy wrote: post #117
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…

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, com…

> In order to finish quickly, you had to be fast and efficient.

How did they get to the point of finish-your-work-quickly? Short pipelines?

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

#174

Post by rbanffy »

dagw wrote: post #145
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?

Looked into getting solar panels last year and the problem wasn't getting the actual panels, but the hardware that let you integrate the panels to the electrical system. Spoke to several people who had had panels on their roof for months, but couldn't get the hardware that would let them connect them.

Depending on what you want, it might be very simple hardware, using panel provided DC for lighting and a 12V DC system and switching to utility provided AC when the sun isn’t providing enough power, all the way to house batteries and selling power back into the grid.

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

#175

Post by rbanffy »

ethbr1 wrote: post #162
jnsaff2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How consumable-intensive is doped silicone production? Afaik, it's more strict metallurgy (materialurgy?): temperature, time, some physical process. Point being, I'd be curious on the actual cost of material inputs, if the price of solar panels crashes. How low can they go... and still be worth making?

> How consumable-intensive is doped silicone production?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38150735, it’s very energy intensive.

> if the price of solar panels crashes. How low can they go... and still be worth making?

Boules are very storable, so it’s the financials of pausing production and storing materials until the price (or new tech) makes it profitable. Not the most socially responsible thing to do in decarbonisation times, but done with aluminium and other energy intensive storables all the time.

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

#176

Post by KaiserPro »

ksec wrote: post #114
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?

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 mad…

To add to this, the IA64 required specialist knowledge to get to run efficiently, given that you've just spent a huge amount on new hardware, you also had to port your stuff to take advantage of the new arch. From what I recall, x86 emulation was there, but just really slow.

So for a few HPC type things, it was an a leap forward, for everything else, it sucked.

It was like the arm based windows surface laptops a few years ago. Lots of promise, none of the software that you actually wanted.

When you looked at the opteron which was 64 bit, run faster, cheaper than the intel and could run vanilla 32bit apps without any changes faster than before, it was a no brainer.

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

#177

Post by demondemidi »

arcticbull wrote: post #92
ethbr1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Long live the Fireball checker-retirement unit and its double clocked pulse generator logic.

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

#178

Post by demondemidi »

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?

Architecture doesn’t matter as much in the cloud. If the backend servers are running storage, kv store, load balancers, etc it doesn’t matter if it is arm or x86. Arm is lower power so you can cram more compute into the same 480V chassis. If architecture doesn’t matter and density improves at lower cost , there’s an opportunity for arm to swoop in. If ampere executes to plan they will succeed where cavium failed.

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

#179

Post by acdha »

philwelch wrote: post #161
ironhaven wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the World Energy Outlook report the fossil fuel industry gets a lot of airtime. In the 2018 report[1] most of the sections are dedicated to oil and gas topic and the section on renewables is very skeptical on the viability of renewables. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2018/

Based on the recent history of the Texas power grid, the skepticism is more than warranted. The cost per megawatt of capacity for renewables is lower than other sources, but the power only gets generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, which means more reliable energy sources are priced out of being added to the grid. Our most recent near-miss at a statewide outage happened because of unexpectedly low…

That’s how the fossil fuel industry describes it, yes, but that’s just them trying to avoid competition. For example, the 2021 winter outages were caused by power plant operators not wanting to spend money making their plants more robust. During this summer’s heat dome, solar was reliable on days when gas, coal and nuclear power plants were offline due to the heat.

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

#180

Post by demondemidi »

drivebycomment wrote: post #123
reidacdc wrote: post #6

On the one hand, I am not surprised -- at my workplace, we only ever had one Itanium system, an SGI Altix 3000-series computer. It was kind of niche even when we bought it, and core-for-core, the Itanium CPUs were slower than their competitors. What the SGI was really good at was MPI parallelism. I don't know how much of that was the CPU and how much was the overall system design of the Altix, which featured a pretty…

It's not a shame. IA64 did more harm than good for the humanity and the computing industry. It was a dead-end architecture that should have died sooner than it did. Hubris and inertia kept it going much longer than it should have, and delayed so much of other progress. I would say good riddance.

Itanium succeeded in one area: giving armchair “experts” a chance to sound smart on forums like this.
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