Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

virtuallyfun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 89 posts

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#41

Post by monocasa »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #26
acdha wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also a long piece by a former Intel chip designer who was incredulous about how much the Itanium team was promising numbers based on a very few hand-scheduled routines for FPU-limited code. I think there’s a solid argument that the design just wasn’t based on a correct understanding of what most CPUs did and over-indexed on the most performance-sensitive HPC code. I once helped run some HPC code on a test I…

> http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/projec... This link requires a log-in.

It apparently works with https. Weird. Quite a journey to figure that out.

https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590a/06au/proj...

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#42

Post by stinkbeetle »

bobmcnamara wrote: post #29
walrus01 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It totally worked! Took out like four decent risc competitors with just a little FOMO

Paper-Itanium is unfairly blamed / credited with that, but it's not exactly true. The vertically integrated RISC/UNIX minicomputer companies were not on economically viable trajectories. x86 systems were undercutting their high margin workstation and server business, subsidized by enormous volumes in PC market needed to sustain increasing silicon manufacturing and design costs of new generations. The RISCs were forced to keep retreating to higher margin, lower volume, more specialized, higher performance markets which was really their only option by that point but it was also exactly the wrong direction to go in for long-term viability in the face of these prevailing trends.

Intel had their foundries and CPU cores paid for by video gamers and receptionists and students typing up their assignments and people looking at porn at 14.4kbps. Servers and workstations were pretty much gravy and every year there was less their systems couldn't do compared to the big iron.

Those computers pretty much sold themselves, contrast with every $20k workstation or $100k server that the unix guys had to explain why they were worth 5x the grey box on the desk.

SGI was struggling to make their MIPS chips and were pretty quickly finished off when nvidia started making GPUs. Itanium originated at HP as a PA-RISC replacement. They owned DEC Alpha when they killed it but arguably DEC didn't have a big base of legacy software at that point. IBM and Sun stood for a lot longer, mainly I would say largely due to locked in customers/data on Oracle and DB2 databases and proprietary software, rather than the merits of their hardware.

If Itanium never happened, 64-bit x86 server chips would have done the same thing to MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, PowerPC. Might have happened even sooner from Intel since they allegedly sandbagged efforts in that direction to protect Itanium.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#43

Post by jcranmer »

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 recall opening up the Itanium manual, and by the end of the architecture description, just despairing of the thought of trying to write a compiler for it. Itanium, I think, was ultimately a victim of its weirdness: it's too weird to really comfortably write assembly by hand; the compilers weren't really capable with its weirdness, so "regular" code was worse off than you'd normally expect. Raymond Chen has pointed out in several articles how the hardware took advantage of C's UB to do some really weird things--and this is an era where most developers expected UB to really be just implementation-defined behavior.

Combine that with the fact that the hardware development process seems to have been compromised from the start (if you told me the hardware architects never looked at anything other than 30-instruction traces of BLAS kernels, I'd believe you), and the insane hype that was built up for it... it's not surprising that it had an extremely underwhelming launch.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#44

Post by fulafel »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #42
bobmcnamara wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It totally worked! Took out like four decent risc competitors with just a little FOMO

Paper-Itanium is unfairly blamed / credited with that, but it's not exactly true. The vertically integrated RISC/UNIX minicomputer companies were not on economically viable trajectories. x86 systems were undercutting their high margin workstation and server business, subsidized by enormous volumes in PC market needed to sustain increasing silicon manufacturing and design costs of new generations. The RISCs were force…

> If Itanium never happened, 64-bit x86 server chips would have done the same thing to MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, PowerPC.

If AMD had launched amd64 server chips those vendors onboard we might have had a different 64-bit x86 market. And those vendors would have had a chance to succeed or fail on their own merits instead of due to dead end chip.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#45

Post by protocolture »

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…

Watching my mate explain to his father for the 100th time that the game wont run on his 64 bit Itanium workstation despite it running windows did eventually get old.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#48

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Had AMD not come out with AMD64, and Itanium would eventually prevail, as there was no other alternative coming from Intel.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#49

Post by chrchr »

pjmlp wrote: post #48
walrus01 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Had AMD not come out with AMD64, and Itanium would eventually prevail, as there was no other alternative coming from Intel.

I vividly remember the months after AMD64 came out when tech companies were dumping their specialty RISC server hardware (mostly Sun, but some other stuff too) and replacing them with commodity AMD boxes. It was felt like a monumental shift.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#50

Post by hypercube33 »

icedchai wrote: post #30
wbl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only the Alpha had hung on.

I have an AlphaServer in my collection (DS10.) For a 25+ year old system, it still feels pretty snappy!

I think I read at one point alpha had a 64bit cpu in the 90s that could have hit 1ghz but some bug held it back. I am having so much trouble finding these articles and stories about processors these days with AI and shitified Google.

The other one I can't find I swear was a former AMD engineer talking about how Intel bet the farm on one ibm mainframe design but AMD went with an older architecture (under the hood of x86 for both) that was harder to deal with but ultimately runs faster and that's how we got ryzen. Maybe I'm just losing my mind.

Post reply on HN