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

51–60 of 89 posts

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#51

Post by shawn_w »

wbl wrote: post #22
twoodfin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If only the Alpha had hung on.

My college was a DEC shop; I learned programming and how to use unix in labs full of dumb X terminals connected to Alpha servers.

Still have a lot of nostalgia for the architecture.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#52

Post by stinkbeetle »

fulafel wrote: post #44
stinkbeetle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AMD did launch amd64 server chips. The first ones were Opteron, first (and only until Nehalem) x86 with ODMC, glueless multiprocessor up to 8-way (though that was a bit flakey, 4-way was decent), and first dual core. It destroyed Intel's CPUs in many measure of performance for server workloads.

Before Intel's decade of humiliation with their 10nm fiasco and before Zen, AMD had a hell of a time getting ISVs and IHVs on board in the server space with producing them, certifying them, etc.,. Which wasn't entirely irrational, Intel was much more mature in a lot of ways in their hardware and software stacks, they were a big company, perceived as less risky, etc.

So it's not too surprising that those companies didn't jump to Opteron. Some did consider it, mind you. Though AMD went through doldrums of their own after Opteron (with Core2/Nehalem-ish era) where they shat the bed with their cores and were pretty handily beaten by Intel for quite a long while until Zen came along -- so that is possibly some vindication for the risk adverse by not going all in on Opteron.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#53

Post by fulafel »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #52
fulafel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

AMD did launch amd64 server chips. The first ones were Opteron, first (and only until Nehalem) x86 with ODMC, glueless multiprocessor up to 8-way (though that was a bit flakey, 4-way was decent), and first dual core. It destroyed Intel's CPUs in many measure of performance for server workloads. Before Intel's decade of humiliation with their 10nm fiasco and before Zen, AMD had a hell of a time getting ISVs and IHVs o…

Yep, those vendors could conceivably been onboard and using launching on Opteron (if there was no Itanium and Intel was seen as the common enemy). They might have given AMD some help with the validation, RAS etc too.

Of course in the alternative history Intel might have done something else in place of IA64 that competed with amd64...

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#54

Post by omnibrain »

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 had bet 100% on it killing PA-RISC and DEC Alpha. They ported HP-UX, OpenVMS and NonStop to it. All 3 of them were tangled up in long running enterprise and government contracts.

They since discontinued HP-UX, offloaded OpenVMS and ported NonStop to x86-64.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#55

Post by pjmlp »

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…

> The vertically integrated RISC/UNIX minicomputer companies were not on economically viable trajectories.

Well, actually one survived, and is making a fruity company quite happy, which also survived the 16 and 8 bit vertically integrated home computer companies.

The successful merge of NeXT and Apple, meant PC OEMs now dream of margins of those days hence why building desktops has become a niche market, everything is vertically integrated across laptops, tablets and phones and smart devices.

That alternative timeline means Intel would actually bother creating 64-bit x86 server chips instead of Itanium, because on their roadmap they were never expecting AMD to come out with an alternative.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#56

Post by pjmlp »

twoodfin wrote: post #20
mrpippy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Between 2000 and 2003, I used Windows Server as desktop at work, after a short period of dual booting between Windows 2000 and Red-Hat Linux, which I stop doing when routinely rebooting into Windows for support started being a frequent habit.

Thus I fully switched to Windows Server to be able to check the same issues as the customers had, and since we only supported big iron UNIX during those years, I would anyway use telnet / X Windows to connect to those machines.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#57

Post by pjmlp »

kstrauser wrote: post #37
twoodfin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, in an alternative timeline AMD would not had the opportunity to come up with AMD64, and we had to suck up Itanium no matter what, and maybe they would be improved.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#59

Post by touisteur »

hypercube33 wrote: post #50
icedchai wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 x…

I think the "Jim Keller" story around Zen is a bet on modularity, core-complexes, then chiplets. Smaller, less monolithic designs and a clean re-design of the x86 cores for compacity, ease of validation and scalability (in core count).

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#60

Post by p_l »

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…

Alpha cancellation happened before HP/Compaq merger, when it was purely Compaq decision.

At the time some partnerships were slowly reducing the base costs of making Alpha machines (with K7 Athlon motherboards and EV6 Alpha being essentially signal compatible but not pinout compatible - you could reuse the chips and most of the design).

Compaq however... was not interested, for various reasons.

Post reply on HN