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Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

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Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#101

Post by greglindahl »

danmaz74 wrote: post #96
captainbland wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, it is kind of disappointing. I think the fact that it would cost so much to come up with something novel and then optimise it to the point that conventional CPUs are at that it seems hardly worth the expenditure. The next major frontier in CPU design would appear to be in materials and manufacturing rather than architecture - although no doubt whatever the post-silicon world looks like will influence fu…

I wonder if something new could emerge to help with massive parallelism, beyond what gpus already do.

An instruction to insert into a queue on another core would be a great thing. The T3E had it, InfiniPath / OmniPath has it between boxes, and I've heard of a research project that did it on a modern cpu.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#103

Post by Something1234 »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #49
zamalek wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine Were a lot of people trying? It was a pretty difficult platform to get hold of and tinker with.

I’m not sure how many people, but it’s all the compiler group at HP did for the last twenty years.

HP has a compiler group. I wasn't aware there were all that many commercial compilers still around, and I definitely wouldn't have thought of HP.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#104

Post by lscotte »

bluedino wrote: post #88
q3k wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs/readline bindings for Delete Word. Open up a bash shell, type in `foo bar baz`, then press ctrl-W twice. '^W' is what would appear instead if you weren't in a readline/emacs editor, but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving '^W' behind makes it look like you didn't realize what you just corrected is still visible. It's a joke. I've now explained and ruined it.

Slashdot posters would use ^H^H in their posts (backspace)

It goes back way further than that - probably to the dawn of IRC or so.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#105

Post by vbezhenar »

greglindahl wrote: post #29
q3k wrote: post #10

Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance. On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started. Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe desi…

There's a ton of innovation happening right now for machine-learning optimized ISAs. And RISC-V has excellent support for extensions. The funniest part of Itanium for me was that it was supposedly helpful to compilers. Yet the compiler people I knew did not like to use the "helpful" parts of the ISA. The loop unrolling stuff got in the way of software pipelining, for example. Mill is an example of a processor that's…

I wonder how did it happen? Intel has its own compiler, surely they could ask their compiler gurus to help with ISA design.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#106

Post by tyingq »

anarazel wrote: post #79
classichasclass wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first machine I ever had root on was a PA-RISC K250 running HP/UX 10.20. Good times. I particularly miss PA-RISC: it was a pretty clean instruction set with good performance, and HP never got their money's worth out of Itanic. There's a C8000 in my collection with dual PA-8900s in it.

PA-RISCs lacking support for any meaningful support for any atomics except TAS (one with weird alignment reqs) forced me to add an atomics emulation layer to postgres. So I somewhat hate it now ;)

I wasn't aware of this before. Looks like the Linux kernel had to solve for that as well: https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FutexImplementation

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#107

Post by ghaff »

Something1234 wrote: post #103
shereadsthenews wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure how many people, but it’s all the compiler group at HP did for the last twenty years.

HP has a compiler group. I wasn't aware there were all that many commercial compilers still around, and I definitely wouldn't have thought of HP.

Who else do you think would have developed the compilers for HP-UX, VMS, and NonStop?

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#108

Post by iforgotpassword »

q3k wrote: post #10

Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance. On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started. Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe desi…

That's the way it goes. Strongest survive. We're also left with only three browser engines by now, two of them being related.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#109

Post by als0 »

bogomipz wrote: post #77
q3k wrote: post #10

Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance. On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started. Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe desi…

>"Itanium is what EFI was first developed for." What is EFI here - extensible firmware interface? If so what is the connection between that and Itanium?

Yes, the standard firmware interface. Those working on the Itanium platform (Intel and presumably HP) wanted to have a boot solution that didn't have the technical shortcomings of existing BIOS designs. That drove an initiative to create a formal spec and an implementation. I believe Itanium was the first platform with EFI, but someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

#110

Post by ghaff »

captainbland wrote: post #39
q3k wrote: post #10

Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance. On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started. Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe desi…

You're right, it is kind of disappointing. I think the fact that it would cost so much to come up with something novel and then optimise it to the point that conventional CPUs are at that it seems hardly worth the expenditure. The next major frontier in CPU design would appear to be in materials and manufacturing rather than architecture - although no doubt whatever the post-silicon world looks like will influence fu…

Although the possibilities are arguably greater for new designs to get traction today.

There are a lot of reasons. Open source, cloud providers, etc. But a big one is that you can't just depend on CMOS process shrinks to make processors faster. Therefore, your new design isn't necessarily going to be eclipsed by whatever new x86 CPU comes out in 12 months.

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