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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

#191

Post by acdha »

hakfoo wrote: post #75
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?

My two cents: Open source displaced a lot of propriatery stacks. When you're running commercial software at $$$$ per license, the customers basically have to stick to whatever hardware is explicitly supported. And the vendors are going to be narrow there. Fewer platforms keep support costs down, and prevent exposure to uncompetitive corners of the market. As long as $expensive_product is only officially supported for…

I’d also add automation becoming pervasive, especially after containers showed up. In the 90s, people bought relatively few expensive servers and ran a ton of stuff on them, almost always hand-rolled (yes, there wren a few crazies running BCFG, cfengine, etc. but that was uncommon outside of a few niches). That meant you couldn’t migrate easily since mapping out dependencies was non-trivial and your admins didn’t want / have time to deal with portability issues. As you mentioned, open source took a lot of that away (no more dealing with bizarre vendor compiler bugs or broken tool chains) and repeatable more isolated builds and deployments made it a lot more realistic to use a different server class where it saved money.

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

#192

Post by acdha »

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.

On AWS it’s like a 20-30% discount - effectively free money for services like RDS, ElastiCache, and often Lambda or even ECS where the effort is either minimal or extremely low.

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

#193

Post by jmyeet »

postmodest wrote: post #183
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…

When I read about Itanium and iAPX 432, I can't help but think that Intel _isn't good at what they do_ and just lucked into he PC market by being cheap, and then riding to coattails of the Windows monopoly. I can't wait for ARM to eat their lunch. And dinner.

When you read now or when you read at the time? I'm curious because context matters. Back in the 1990s when all this kicked off there was still a strong believe that RISC (vs CISC) was the future. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence to support this, most notably that the workstation and server spaces were dominated by RISC chips like Sparc, Alpha and MIPS.

I do believe that whoever drove the Centrino movement (from mobile originally to desktop) saved the company. They laid the foundation for Intel's next 15 years of success.

The original licensing agreement with AMD is an interesting part of Intel history too. Were that to happen today, it would probably be viewed as a disaster. In our modern era of short term corporate decision-making, it would probably be viewed negatively too.

But it led to Intel's complete dominance thanks to x86 for decades. It killed pretty much every other architecture (other than ARM). It's only in the last 5-10 years that dominance has really wavered.

Intel's big strength had always been their ability to fab chips at scale with low failure rate so the parts were hugely profitable. For decades the likes of AMD just didn't have that manufacturing capacity at the same scale and price. Intel led die-shrinking that was a huge driver to profits. It's only when they tried to move to 10nm that it all fell apart. Now TSMC has eaten their lunch. Intel is at risk of moving from being a first-party designer and fab of chips to producing third-party chips.

If someone woke up from a 20 year coma and you told them about Intel's market position and fate they would be shocked. That's how big of a fall from grace it's been. But that's largely on the fab side, not the design side. Only recently has the Core architecture really hit its limit where Intel CPUs consume too much power and run too hot to eke out the last ounce of power.

Itanium was a joint venture betwen HP and Intel. We can certainly look back now and say it was bad. I'm not convinced that determination was as easy at the time although it did have its critics.

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

#194

Post by dvaletin »

p_l wrote: post #157
dvaletin wrote: post #18

Why it took so long?

It took extra long because for various reasons it was the officially blessed architecture (specifically, HP-UX on Itanium) for running Oracle databases, leading to HP suing Oracle when the latter bought Sun and essentially declared HP-UX is to soon be EOL'd

Okay, but we speak about Linux here!

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

#195

Post by dixie_land »

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.

I am not nearly as knowledgeable as many of the commenters here on the hardware, but I do have first hand experiences running ARM on production at scale.

What AWS offers and what Google offers are not even close: on AWS, our workloads actually perform better (as in, higher QPS/core, resulting in fewer pods/instances), in addition to being more cost effective (both in terms of per-instance price to begging with, and less instances in total, due to aforementioned higher QPS/core serving same amount of total requests). For the limited ARM offer from Google we tested, the performance is worse than equivalent x86 instances, in addition to no price incentives.

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

#197

Post by acdha »

philwelch wrote: post #189
acdha wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That’s how the fossil fuel industry describes it, yes, but that’s just them trying to avoid competition. Renewables, especially construction of new renewables, is a big, lucrative, growing business of its own. That’s actually a direct implication of the triumphant statistics people keep sharing about how much renewable power generation gets built out every year. So the “fossil fuel industry” is not unique in its ve…

The near outage this summer was more accurately described as wind being low enough that it almost wasn't able to fill the gap caused by the gas, coal, and nuclear plants going offline. Unlike wind and solar those are quite heat sensitive so you can get nasty correlated failures at peak summer demand, especially if the same weather system causes any kind of interruption to the cooling water supply.

And, yes, renewables are becoming a big industry but it’s nowhere near as big as the fossil fuel industry and orders of magnitude less lavishly subsidized. Texas Republicans tried to ban wind and solar expansion because that party has been owned by the oil industry for decades and the renewable industry has nowhere near the same level of lobbying clout.

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

#198

Post by p_l »

dvaletin wrote: post #194
p_l wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took extra long because for various reasons it was the officially blessed architecture (specifically, HP-UX on Itanium) for running Oracle databases, leading to HP suing Oracle when the latter bought Sun and essentially declared HP-UX is to soon be EOL'd

Okay, but we speak about Linux here!

Ah, somehow I figured out you were asking why IA-64 kept on for so long - as in the architecture in general - not just in Linux.

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

#199

Post by cptskippy »

xattt wrote: post #173
cptskippy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Intel invested heavily in P4 and made the P4 pipeline really long which allowed for higher clocks.

So for Banias started with the P3 pipeline which was already short and added the microop fusion that I believe was introduced in P4. As well a cribbing a lot of other enhancements from Netburst.

It's been several years since I read up on it so I'm rust on all the details.

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

#200

Post by duskwuff »

jodrellblank wrote: post #49
duskwuff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contrast with the notorious IAE solar forecast "There's no way this level of growth can be sustainable." "Surely we've hit a stable level by now." "Maybe that last year was a fluke." Love to see it. :)

> " "There's no way this level of growth can be sustainable." " Those are GW of added capacity per year, their prediction flatlining is predicting sustaining the same level of growth.

And yet, they were still (mis)predicting that each year would be an inflection point on that growth.
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