Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish this could make it to qemu's main branch; always fun to preserve new systems. I wonder if it runs openvms/ia64 too!
I think most of the machines that could run Windows could also run OpenVMS. It’s a bit unfortunate the company behind the OS needs to make money off its licenses though.
A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
11–20 of 83 posts
Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
#12Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
#13Neat I did this on real hardware twenty plus years ago. Also tried Debian, iirc. My memory is that the workstation perf was decent but the thing was loud and used a lot of power. x86 emulation was slow. The nick, Itanic was mostly deserved.
Even the 800lb guerilla Intel had to acknowledge amd64 was the next step, or it could end up a niche use chip like PowerPC.
The moral of the story is usability matters with consumer chip architecture. =3
Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
#14“It runs quite slowly, (486-levels of performance on a Ryzen 5000 series according to this discord channel)” I’m sure there’s a joke about that being a huge leap in performance for Windows on IA-64 over the past 23 years waiting to be made from this.
Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
#15Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
#16“It runs quite slowly, (486-levels of performance on a Ryzen 5000 series according to this discord channel)” I’m sure there’s a joke about that being a huge leap in performance for Windows on IA-64 over the past 23 years waiting to be made from this.
To be fair, most of ia64 performance issues were in the more complicated compilers. The chip itself had potential, but essentially abandoned the DOS/Windows market inertia. =3
Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
#17It’s the product of companies bent on doing all the wrong things.
Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
#18The Itanic was built specifically by HP to sink Fujitsu, hitachi, nec, unisys and sgi. So in that sense it was a success.
Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
#19What's even crazier is that someone vibe-coded ia64 emulation support for QEMU: https://github.com/syunnPC/qemu-system-ia64
It booted Linux fine, was working on booting IPF EFI firmware when I got distracted by life and other projects.
Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
#20“It runs quite slowly, (486-levels of performance on a Ryzen 5000 series according to this discord channel)” I’m sure there’s a joke about that being a huge leap in performance for Windows on IA-64 over the past 23 years waiting to be made from this.
To be fair, most of ia64 performance issues were in the more complicated compilers. The chip itself had potential, but essentially abandoned the DOS/Windows market inertia. =3
VLIW works for single workloads. It works exceptionally well for single workloads with no or explicit cache like DSP. You can trade the footprint and complexity from OoO for a wider execution unit and more SRAM. It works well for HPC, too, for the same reason. But for anything where more than one process exists, it just really doesn’t work, and that’s most modern workload.
Itanium also has a unique set of self inflicted issues due in large part to Intel trying to make a wide variety of cross compatible parts, but IMO even if they’d got it right, it still would have died.