21–30 of 83 posts
The Itanic was built specifically by HP to sink Fujitsu, hitachi, nec, unisys and sgi. So in that sense it was a success.
True. But it’s a technological representation of all that’s wrong with the industry.
I was working for a large bank and it was all windows, including production. We used to run WebSphere Application Server on Windows. I was looking for a dev server to run unit tests on, including integration tests which required an actual WebSphere instance. The infrastructure team said they had “a box” going spare and it turned out to be IA64 on Windows.
If my memory serves me correctly WebSphere only ran on windows for IA-64 up to 6 and we were running on 7.
I had to do a bit of hacking but I did manage to get it working using the dlls from the 6 version. It was fine for running integration tests and a pretty fast box considering.
“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
It had potential but until you have an easy transition path, few will consider it. Apple figured that out during the 68K > PPC > X86 > ARM transitions.
What's even crazier is that someone vibe-coded ia64 emulation support for QEMU: https://github.com/syunnPC/qemu-system-ia64
It's interesting to see how LLMs have definitely become a force-multiplier to motivate people into doing things they wouldn't otherwise have the time and effort to.
And yet, some folks have come to the battle and have ended up extensively using LLM's to code it. It is wild to see that these things can target such an obscure platform and get some decent results in a very short amount of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPxhuKTltsk
This is something that doesn't have any real economic value but many are more than happy to see happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
No (sorry, I post this every time the Mythical Compiler Myth reappears), the problem with VLIW is that it fundamentally doesn’t work for anything with unpredictable memory access patterns, and modern general purpose computing has moved almost exclusively in this direction. For VLIW to work, you need to either guess correctly what is in cache or not have a cache at all; as soon as you mispredict what has been loaded,…
gcc maintained the ia64 target a long time for unclear reasons, but it was also still inefficient on other platforms. The FOSS compiler worked, but that was its only performance metric that counted for many users. =3
Not sure why you think the Intel compilers were a myth, as they are still around working far better than gcc in many use-cases:
"An Overview of the Intel® IA-64 Compiler"
https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/courses/605/papers/In...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting to see how LLMs have definitely become a force-multiplier to motivate people into doing things they wouldn't otherwise have the time and effort to.
I have been pairing with Claude Opus and it’s quite impressive. I have explored a number of possible changes to things like VTE and the Hercules mainframe emulator.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Itanium is yet another example of how difficult it is to fight software ecosystem momentum. It had potential but until you have an easy transition path, few will consider it. Apple figured that out during the 68K > PPC > X86 > ARM transitions.
Apple is an exception as it has always had a walled-garden ecosystem with the OS, so can force shifts in architectures unlike most companies. The M3/M4 Pro series with unified GPUs is probably the best design on the consumer market right now, but people are not leveraging it as much as they would have in other ecosystems.
Have a wonderful day =3
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yeah EPIC pushed too much effort onto compilers and removed the context awareness of out of order reordering etc and the result was just a lame duck.
What's even crazier is that someone vibe-coded ia64 emulation support for QEMU: https://github.com/syunnPC/qemu-system-ia64
It's interesting to see how LLMs have definitely become a force-multiplier to motivate people into doing things they wouldn't otherwise have the time and effort to.
It's bone crushingly dry to try and figure this kind of shit out yourself, can do everything right according to every available reference and code comment only to get compiler and linker errors nobody has ever seen or posted about. Weeks and weeks of smashing your face against a wall until it gives. Now anyone can get twice as far in an evening. And that fuckin rules
Hard to not get a little hyperbolic about it... but I can't wait for everyone to exhaust their meme projects/ports and models to get just a bit better. Feels like we're about to have something of a golden age when everyone starts really making the stuff they've always wanted.
When it comes to Itanium all I can think of is how I wish I could have an Alpha. And how no one should care about Itanium. It’s the product of companies bent on doing all the wrong things.
Taking for granted that hardware backcompat (Itanium had this, too!) was a starting requirement…