The Itanium sales forecasts never fail to make me laugh. Aged like the finest wine:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
11–20 of 220 posts
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#12The latest 9700 models from 2017 are still in support until 2025!
I presume you mean "by Intel", because Linux has other ideas. :-)
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#13I had a manager that loved these things. He would shoe horn eBay one’s into any gambling backend he did. It was terrible, impossible to support and made accomplishing anything a chore.
Rust in peace.
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
2009 summary https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp > The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel—and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level. > It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above.…
This piece sounds like a lot of misrepresentation and exaggeration.
Whether the DEC Alpha development stopped because of Merced (as it was called then) or because of the 1997 legal mess https://www.wired.com/1997/10/intel-dec-settle-alpha-chip-di... is quite hard to say.
The DEC Alpha architecture was planned for 25 years and it certainly was not technical barriers that killed the Alpha 21464.
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#15It's funny thinking back to the hype cycle of Itanium back in the heady days where performance was doubling every year, desktop was king and this was the future . Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the future. Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always.
It was only the future until release date forced it to face the reality.
Linus Torvalds in 2003: https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/x86.html
>Itanium 2 doesn't hold a candle to a P4 on any real-world benchmarks.
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#16The Itanium sales forecasts never fail to make me laugh. Aged like the finest wine: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
Contrast with the notorious IAE solar forecast: https://zenmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/iea-vs-reality-...
Statistics and modeling are complicated, granted. But when your model diverges from reality 5 years in a row, perhaps you should just extrapolate the current line next time around.
(In the case of the Itanic, that would have been the line at 0. Still a better forecast than what they did!)
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#17The Itanium sales forecasts never fail to make me laugh. Aged like the finest wine: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
Easily one of the best illustrations on Wikipedia.
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#18Why it took so long?
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#19On the one hand, I am not surprised -- at my workplace, we only ever had one Itanium system, an SGI Altix 3000-series computer. It was kind of niche even when we bought it, and core-for-core, the Itanium CPUs were slower than their competitors. What the SGI was really good at was MPI parallelism. I don't know how much of that was the CPU and how much was the overall system design of the Altix, which featured a pretty…
numalink, 1.6GB/s in 2003!
there's an altix 3000 on ebay that I'm kinda tempted by https://www.ebay.com/itm/174917876903
it only runs like one specific version of suse or red hat
Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
This piece sounds like a lot of misrepresentation and exaggeration.
Whether the DEC Alpha development stopped because of Merced (as it was called then) or because of the 1997 legal mess https://www.wired.com/1997/10/intel-dec-settle-alpha-chip-di... is quite hard to say. The DEC Alpha architecture was planned for 25 years and it certainly was not technical barriers that killed the Alpha 21464.
In the end it was market forces that did it in. Making new chips was (still is!) exponentially more expensive for each generation, and at the same time mass market chips were getting better and better while they could amortize the NRE costs over zillions of chips sold, eating the market from below. And other RISC competitors (and IA-64) were attacking from the sides. DEC just didn't have the customer base or depth of pockets to fund Alpha development. That it was Itanium that ultimately delivered the coup de grace was but the final insult.