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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

#31

Post by bluedino »

monocasa wrote: post #6
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

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…

I wonder if most people kept them around just so they don't have to port their apps or migrate to something new.

I worked at an HP shop, and Itanium ran HP/UX so they kept running their business on their PickBASIC (and whatever database that I've forgotten the name of) system

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#32

Post by icedchai »

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

Itanium was effectively dead once Intel adopted AMD's x86-64. It just remained a zombie for another 15+ years.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#34

Post by twoodfin »

t1234s wrote: post #33

was there any advantage or special use case for running an itanium windows workstation instead of x86 back then?

More than 3GB of application memory space and more than 4GB overall (including the NT kernel).

At that time, this was starting to become a major issue at the high end of servers and workstations.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#35

Post by MBCook »

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

It was neat to live through the era where CPUs constantly got faster and they were willing to try such oddball stuff.

For such a long time it became “faster and more cores, don’t be different” and just didn’t seem as interesting.

Apple Silicon had been very interesting to me. I’m really hoping to see a stronger ARM push on Windows, both because I know it can be great and because it’s just interesting. Windows has never had to switch architectures (for consumers) or support two at once for any reasonable population.

Also, whatever happened to mill? We used to get posts about them all the time.

And I wonder what would have happened to Power if they had the 3rd party fabs that exist today instead of being stuck with what IBM could make in-house.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#36

Post by MBCook »

ndiddy wrote: post #19
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…

The lack of licensing to other companies was clearly a POWERFUL incentive.

Imagine how much money they could make if that pesky AMD went away.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#37

Post by kstrauser »

twoodfin wrote: post #34
t1234s wrote: post #33

was there any advantage or special use case for running an itanium windows workstation instead of x86 back then?

More than 3GB of application memory space and more than 4GB overall (including the NT kernel). At that time, this was starting to become a major issue at the high end of servers and workstations.

And then AMD64 came along and we immediately moved to 8GB servers, taking away the only real Itanium advantage.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#40

Post by Nursie »

taspeotis wrote: post #23
qingcharles wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think HP had a big investment in Itanium and even sued Oracle to get them to keep supporting Itanium (they had contractually agreed to it, but Itanium was such a dead end...)

They did, IIRC back in the late 00s they were also paying IBM to port software to HP-UX on Itanium, because I remember I was given a machine to play with and was asked to produce builds of some components.

From what I remember the only drama was that there was a missing pthread_ API implementation on the platform, might have been pthread_gettime or something.

Compared to the HP-UX on PA-RISC box I had access to at the time, the performance was amazing!

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