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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

#71

Post by spijdar »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #66
p_l wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh you must be right, I mix up my time lines. In any case the economics were more or less the same as Alpha as for the others. They couldn't support integrated silicon manufacturing. It wasn't even just the manufacturing (which could be outsourced although arguably not as competitively as integrated shops like Intel until TSMC really hit its stride). Or the logic and physical design. But the software development and…

I think you're right overall that Itanium is used too often as the reason why all the RISC platforms died/were cancelled, as if they would have had healthy futures had Itanium simply not existed, but I do wonder about Alpha.

I wasn't around at the time, so I don't know what availability and pricing actually looked like, but unlike the other RISC platforms, Alpha was actually available on PC-like systems, with PCI and ISA busses, and x86 emulation at the firmware layer, allowing regular PC peripherals like VGA cards to work. Windows and, significantly, Linux, had pretty superb support for Alpha.

It's not enough to suggest that it had a chance "in any reality", but it seems like a much more potent competitor than PowerPC or SPARC or MIPS, it only because of the platform and OS support. Both Windows and Linux had pretty capable x86 emulation software layers too, and not just at the very end!

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#72

Post by saati »

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.

It wouldn't, performance was horrible.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#73

Post by guenthert »

qingcharles wrote: post #17
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.

I'm rather surprised that they did end. After all, Itanium is one of few architectures (also the Russian Ebrus comes to mind) which doesn't exhibit the SPECTRE vulnerability.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#74

Post by hylaride »

adrian_b wrote: post #64
stinkbeetle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Already at launch, and also during the next few years, until Intel fought back with Core 2 (but in servers the Core 2 descendants became better than Opterons only in 2009, with the Nehalem Xeons), Opteron was immensely better than the UltraSPARC CPUs used in the Sun servers. Only the Fujitsu SPARC CPUs were somewhat competitive, even if still significantly weaker. The Intel Pentium 4 Xeons were also worse, despite hi…

At a previous job circa 2008-12, we were a sun shop and moved from spark to x86 Solaris. It screamed at sustained, high-concurrency loads and our workloads benefited from the trinity of Solaris' threading, ZFS tiered storage, and zones/containers. By the time the Intel Nehalem chips became available to use, our DB loads screamed, too. There were edge cases where the sparc chips were better, but not at the price points offered. Linux was competitive at a performance level (though we always saw some issues if the machines were pegged for sustained amounts of time), but production containerization in those days was VMWare, which was enough of a performance hit to not be worth it.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#75

Post by p_l »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #66
p_l wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh you must be right, I mix up my time lines. In any case the economics were more or less the same as Alpha as for the others. They couldn't support integrated silicon manufacturing. It wasn't even just the manufacturing (which could be outsourced although arguably not as competitively as integrated shops like Intel until TSMC really hit its stride). Or the logic and physical design. But the software development and…

Windows on Alpha and FX!32 were reasonably solid options, as was the general health of the Alpha ecosystem. The platform also was not overextended in dot-com boom as much as let's say Sun. Windows port was also pretty early, even if it was 32bit limited.

The big benefit for EV6 was that it had actual parts commonality with PC, and I do not mean few I/O chips like some of the others (SuperIO, network, etc.) but northbridge - anyone making a K7 motherboard could make an Alpha motherboard, and Samsung became first vendor selling both CPUs and complete systems with non-Compaq chips.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#76

Post by pjmlp »

saati wrote: post #72
pjmlp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It wouldn't, performance was horrible.

Yes it would, when the only way is to press forward, eventually something has to improve.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#77

Post by acdha »

kmeisthax wrote: post #24
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…

It's doubly funny knowing that basically nobody bothers doing these kinds of workloads on CPU if they can help it. And everything you have to do to get GPU floating point performance also makes GPUs really, really bad for normal CPU code. Hell, at one point AMD actually was shipping VLIW for shader code...

I think that’s really illustrating how the problem isn’t what they expected: nobody was doing GPU computing in the 90s and when it became huge that was specialized for certain classes of work and involved custom toolchains. The fact that even AMD’s VLIW ended up diverging on later models makes me think Itanium was doomed even if it had shipped on time and budget.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#78

Post by walrus01 »

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

It wasn't really Itanium that killed RISC-based unix-like competitors, but just generally price. People realized you could do a shit-ton of clever things on a x86 platform, Pentium 3 class server on a $2500 1U or 2U rackmount machine. This is in the single core cpu era.

Running FreeBSD or OpenBSD or Linux and you didn't need to spend $14,000 on a SGI or Sun or HP or IBM AIX machine or similar. People didn't buy Itanium for the same reasons they didn't buy $14,000 Suns, except weird low volume enterprise customers. The death of the old-unix-like RISC machines in the market was due to broadly everything in the early i686-class Xeons, Pentium 2/3, early Opterons, etc.

Edit: this is my direct personal experience, but FreeBSD or Linux in 2002 was already far ahead of a legacy unix in terms of usability and ability to customize things. The legacy vendors were stuck in a model of software that literally came in a physical box on a CD-ROM and was rarely updated. And you had to pay out the ass for it. I remember having a FreeBSD system with KDE 2.x desktop in 2002 and it was far more usable than anything Sun or SGI.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#80

Post by acdha »

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.

Sorry about that and thanks @monocasa for correcting the link. I’ve had that bookmarked for a decade.
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