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Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

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Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#11

Post by eej71 »

twoodfin wrote: post #10
monocasa wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I feel like I need to write a blog post about this, but succinctly I think there's a good argument to be made that the issue wasn't the compiler despite popular wisdom. I don't even think it was the nature of unpredictable memory access times either as the itanium has a ton of special architectural hardware to handle unpredictable memory accesses (a lot of which are essentially some of the primitives that an OoO c…

It was also planned for a world where high-end CPUs were differentiated by their ability to run floating-point-heavy workloads with relatively predictable memory access patterns. The rise of the web—and databases behind it—as the dominant high-end, high-margin workload obsoleted that assumption. There’s a great presentation floating around where a Compaq-acquired-DEC engineer is trying to justify how great the OpenVM…

I worked for a company that had a fairly large OpenVMS installation and had to make the transition from Alpha to Itanium. It required a considerable amount of work and the early iterations of Itanium did not provide a clear performance improvement over the final Alpha EV7z that we had been using in some GS1280s.

Going by my faulty memory, I'd say it wasn't until Tukwila that it was a clear win over Alpha EV7z. By the time Tukwila arrived, it was pretty clear that Itanium's goose was already cooked.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#12

Post by mrpippy »

twoodfin wrote: post #8
sedatk wrote: post #5

A historical note: Windows XP 64-bit Edition that was mentioned in the article, was Itanium-specific. It was based on XP kernel while Windows XP x64 Edition (for AMD64 architecture) was based on Windows Server 2003 kernel. Because of that, Windows XP x64 Edition had some significantly different performance characteristics compared to other Windows XP editions. If anything, it was closer to Vista than XP in some aspec…

I would love to read the Microsoft PM spec for this product. Who in the world were they making it for? Itanium never made it into the consumer-class hardware that was XP’s audience. AFAIK, Intel never even published a roadmap for that to happen! Maybe a proof of concept they shipped as a demonstration of loyalty to Intel?!

There were Itanium workstations (https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_i2000.html, https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_zx2000.html), but of course these quickly crashed and burned with the rest of Itanium

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#13

Post by walrus01 »

twoodfin wrote: post #8
sedatk wrote: post #5

A historical note: Windows XP 64-bit Edition that was mentioned in the article, was Itanium-specific. It was based on XP kernel while Windows XP x64 Edition (for AMD64 architecture) was based on Windows Server 2003 kernel. Because of that, Windows XP x64 Edition had some significantly different performance characteristics compared to other Windows XP editions. If anything, it was closer to Vista than XP in some aspec…

I would love to read the Microsoft PM spec for this product. Who in the world were they making it for? Itanium never made it into the consumer-class hardware that was XP’s audience. AFAIK, Intel never even published a roadmap for that to happen! Maybe a proof of concept they shipped as a demonstration of loyalty to Intel?!

In approx. 2000 to 2002, 2003 or around then, there was a theoretical dream that Itanium based workstations would become a real mass market thing, but it obviously never caught on.

Intel never made Itanium CPUs cheap enough to realistically purchase and Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers (the same companies that were making really nice boards for the 1 GHz to 1.2 GHz socketed Pentium 3 with 512KB cache and the first generations of Pentium 4).

Also the performance sucked. This was before AMD64 existed on the corporate desktop or home desktop.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#14

Post by acdha »

walrus01 wrote: post #13
twoodfin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to read the Microsoft PM spec for this product. Who in the world were they making it for? Itanium never made it into the consumer-class hardware that was XP’s audience. AFAIK, Intel never even published a roadmap for that to happen! Maybe a proof of concept they shipped as a demonstration of loyalty to Intel?!

In approx. 2000 to 2002, 2003 or around then, there was a theoretical dream that Itanium based workstations would become a real mass market thing, but it obviously never caught on. Intel never made Itanium CPUs cheap enough to realistically purchase and Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers (the same companies that were making really nice boards for the 1 GHz to…

Yeah, that was real soon now in the mid-90s – I remember reading Byte in high school and they’d be talking about how Alpha, MIPS, etc. workstations were doomed and then it kept getting pushed back – maybe 98/99, early in the next century, … and then AMD launched x86-64 and everyone just stopped pretending Itanium was ever going to happen.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#15

Post by tech234a »

I wonder if people are able to get Windows Server 2008 R2 to run on this yet as well. That was the last Windows OS to support Itanium, and it received updates until January 14, 2020.

EDIT: there was also an additional patch released in May 2020 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008_R2#Itanium

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#16

Post by ghaff »

twoodfin wrote: post #8
sedatk wrote: post #5

A historical note: Windows XP 64-bit Edition that was mentioned in the article, was Itanium-specific. It was based on XP kernel while Windows XP x64 Edition (for AMD64 architecture) was based on Windows Server 2003 kernel. Because of that, Windows XP x64 Edition had some significantly different performance characteristics compared to other Windows XP editions. If anything, it was closer to Vista than XP in some aspec…

I would love to read the Microsoft PM spec for this product. Who in the world were they making it for? Itanium never made it into the consumer-class hardware that was XP’s audience. AFAIK, Intel never even published a roadmap for that to happen! Maybe a proof of concept they shipped as a demonstration of loyalty to Intel?!

It's pretty simple. There was a point in the early 2000s (especially pre-AMD x64) when it was pretty broadly assumed that Itanium from Intel was going to inevitably win given that a 64-bit transition was inevitable (correct) and that it would happen on Intel's terms (incorrect).

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#17

Post by qingcharles »

tech234a wrote: post #15

I wonder if people are able to get Windows Server 2008 R2 to run on this yet as well. That was the last Windows OS to support Itanium, and it received updates until January 14, 2020. EDIT: there was also an additional patch released in May 2020 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008_R2#Itanium

Wild that shipments of Itaniums didn't end until 2021.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#18

Post by nl »

mghackerlady wrote: post #2

I miss itanium. I feel like a madman for saying it, but I do. Something about it is just alluring to me. Alas, the problems were too hard to solve or weren't worth solving anymore Ironically, it died around the time LLMs/AI started becoming good. I feel like the compiler problems with vliw could be solved to a degree with a purpose built ai

> Ironically, it died around the time LLMs/AI started becoming good.

What?

I think maybe you are confusing Itanium with something else?

Development on itanium stopped in 2013:

> On 31 January 2013 Intel issued an update to their plans for Kittson: it would have the same LGA1248 socket and 32 nm process as Poulson, thus effectively halting any further development of Itanium processors.[1]

It's true that it shipped until 2021, but I think you had to already have previous orders to get that.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#19

Post by ndiddy »

mghackerlady wrote: post #2

I miss itanium. I feel like a madman for saying it, but I do. Something about it is just alluring to me. Alas, the problems were too hard to solve or weren't worth solving anymore Ironically, it died around the time LLMs/AI started becoming good. I feel like the compiler problems with vliw could be solved to a degree with a purpose built ai

Even if the magical Itanium compiler did exist, Itanium would have still lost to AMD64. As soon as you introduce anything that doesn't behave in a statically predictable manner (multitasking, or virtualization, or even an application that processes unpredictable input like a web backend or database), your performance drops down to a fraction of what a similarly priced AMD64 chip could do. VLIW is great for some very specific workloads like HPC, but Intel should have never tried to replace x86 with it.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#20

Post by twoodfin »

mrpippy wrote: post #12
twoodfin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to read the Microsoft PM spec for this product. Who in the world were they making it for? Itanium never made it into the consumer-class hardware that was XP’s audience. AFAIK, Intel never even published a roadmap for that to happen! Maybe a proof of concept they shipped as a demonstration of loyalty to Intel?!

There were Itanium workstations ( https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_i2000.html , https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_zx2000.html ), but of course these quickly crashed and burned with the rest of Itanium

Yeah, I had forgotten that by the Windows XP/Server 2003 era, the latter was definitely a server product, with XP targeting the workstation world.

That still seems weird to me. If I had to rely on a PC for high-end work in that period, I wanted the server SKU.

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