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A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

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Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

#41

Post by Joel_Mckay »

MBCook wrote: post #37
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, everyone has a pet architecture that fascinates them, but if its so good only 5 people can code for the target... it is e-waste within a year. 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 leverag…

The walled garden is an advantage of some sort, but they’ve also never made a bad call on switching architectures. We don’t know what it would look like if Apple had chosen something that ended up like Itanium. It’s quite possible they don’t have the clout to pull it off. (Maybe they should have gone Intel instead of PPC, but both were significantly better than m68k at that point)

>We don’t know what it would look like if Apple had chosen something that ended up like Itanium

Apple made a few mistakes, but mostly by trying to compete with doomed hype markets like AR/VR.

Some also ponder what the ecosystem would look like today if the Windows NT kernel had stayed on RISC like initially planned.

The "What if __ ?" universe are fun to imagine, but ultimately less important than the "What now?" universe we live in. =3

Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

#42

Post by nubinetwork »

natas wrote: post #11
rbanffy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

don't they still give some hobbyist licenses?

I'm still waiting on mine, I doubt I'll ever see it though...

Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

#43

Post by monocasa »

bri3d wrote: post #20
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #14

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,…

Itanium had all sorts of specialized machinery so that you could issue a load that's required in the future, and then keep chugging away at the instruction stream, similar to what an OoO processor does with it's reordering logic.

One example was "advanced loads" which allowed you to issue a load as soon as you knew the address, even in the face of potential pointer aliasing in the future, and then later complete the load when you actually hit a data dependency that requires it. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150805-00/?p=91...

Another example is "speculative loads" which lets you issue a load before you even know if it's valid, such as unrolling a loop for an array that you don't know if is a multiple of the unrolled loop chunk length (and therefore might trap with a page fault if fully resolved). https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150804-00/?p=91...

Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

#44

Post by MBCook »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #41
MBCook wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The walled garden is an advantage of some sort, but they’ve also never made a bad call on switching architectures. We don’t know what it would look like if Apple had chosen something that ended up like Itanium. It’s quite possible they don’t have the clout to pull it off. (Maybe they should have gone Intel instead of PPC, but both were significantly better than m68k at that point)

>We don’t know what it would look like if Apple had chosen something that ended up like Itanium Apple made a few mistakes, but mostly by trying to compete with doomed hype markets like AR/VR. Some also ponder what the ecosystem would look like today if the Windows NT kernel had stayed on RISC like initially planned. The "What if __ ?" universe are fun to imagine, but ultimately less important than the "What now?" uni…

Oh sure, Apple has TONS of mistakes if we look overall.

I was only talking about CPU transitions.

Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

#45

Post by userbinator »

pizza234 wrote: post #9
userbinator wrote: post #3

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.

It really depends on the end goal. For personal tools that one uses, LLMs are extremely useful. But publicly used software doesn't only need to be written - it also needs to be maintained. And considering that it's extremely easy to implement features that are not used, vibe coded software tends to be, in best case, a mixed bag, and in worst (I believe typical) case, quickly abandoned. Vibe coded software is the mode…

Vibe coded software is the modern equivalent of the shovelware of the 90s.

I don't think so, especially as the latter was attempting to make a profit but this clearly wasn't done with a for-profit motive in mind.

Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

#46

Post by shoo »

djhope99 wrote: post #22

I have a funny story about a windows IA-64 box. 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 s…

Am I right to guess that neither your dev nor prod machines ran IA-64? If so that's not ideal, but beggars can't be choosers & a spare box from the infra team available right now is better than getting a box built to meet your exact specs available after the usual multi-quarter internal lead time.

Superficially it sounds a little crazy, but it's probably a lot less crazy than far more mainstream antipatterns (e.g. 'lets have our CI download all the dependencies from npm over the internet each time the build runs')!

Did running the unit tests on IA-64 ever flush out genuine issues that were 'working by accident' on x86?

Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

#47

Post by wmf »

MBCook wrote: post #36
wmf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Itanium 1 had hardware x86 compatibility and Itanium 2 had software x86 emulation just like Apple. It wasn't enough.

Right. PPC was significantly faster than m68k. Intel was significantly faster again. Finally ARM was yet again. (ARM and Intel especially on laptops) They could pay the emulation price and still come out equal or usually on top. Even when equal there were often other benefits, like reduced heat. As I remember hearing Itanium was a dog with x86 code. It never got fast enough to compete let alone supplant it during emu…

IIRC Itanium was faster on natively compiled HPC code, presumably because it had more FPUs and larger cache than the Pentium 4. But in general it probably wasn't a good upgrade and Intel would have had to sandbag x86 a lot to force Itanium adoption.

Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

#48

Post by abbeyj »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #28
qubex wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

I think they meant EPIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instructio..., not EPYC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyc.

Re: A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

#49

Post by shrubble »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #28
qubex wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

EPIC is Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing; nothing to do with the AMD trademark word, EPYC.
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