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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

#121

Post by jandrese »

zamalek wrote: post #47
shereadsthenews wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hand-written code for Itanium was always smoking fast. One-clock microkernel message passes and other insanity. But nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine.

> 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.

There were people trying, but there are some real fundamental issues with the approach for general purpose computing. It's extremely hard for a compiler to know if some data is in cache, in memory, or way out in swap. Without this information it's very hard to know how long any memory fetch is going to take. If you're trying to run a lot of computation in parallel that has some interdependencies then this information is paramount.

It's kind of like trying to use a GPU for general purpose computation. Itanium should have been a coprocessor.

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

#122

Post by jandrese »

tyingq wrote: post #78
hyperman1 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered why they inclued it. There seems to be literally no uses for it, even no case where it is anything but dangerous. Even when shutting down the system, init needs to run. Can anybody enlighten me?

"killall - kill all active processes killall is used by shutdown (1M) to kill all active processes not directly related to the shutdown procedure " So, intended for use by shutdown(1M) and nothing else. It's basically a completely different utility to the Linux one. They just happen to, unfortunately, share the same name.

It really shouldn't even be in the path. There's basically no reason for an admin to run it by hand.

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

#123

Post by jandrese »

tyingq wrote: post #7
anonymfus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops HP from porting it to other architectures?

Demand. Porting from PA-RISC to Itanium wasn't pain free for end users. Porting to Linux/x64 isn't likely much more effort than some HPUX/x64 that doesn't exist yet.

If you are going to x86_64 you might as well run Linux these day. The only people who might still need HPUX are people who have binary software packages that only run on HPUX, and they obviously won't run on x86_64.

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

#124

Post by ghaff »

johnklos wrote: post #14

They shouldn't have killed an excellent processor (the Alpha) which already had tons of software and history and was already being used in the fastest supercomputers in the world for a product that was never (and still isn't) proven. The Itanic was never best in its class at anything.

Who is they in this case?

Around the time that the Itanium project was announced (and had presumably been being worked on behind the scenes for quite a while) was when Compaq bought DEC. HP wouldn't buy Compaq until about 5 years later. So Itanium was already well underway by the time switching to Alpha would have been a remote possibility.

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

#125

Post by pjscott »

lscotte wrote: post #104
bluedino wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe it dates back to the unix talk(1) program, quite a bit earlier than IRC.

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

#126

Post by Something1234 »

ghaff wrote: post #107
Something1234 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Present tense. The GP comment was in present tense, not a long time ago.

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

#127

Post by bogomipz »

spamizbad wrote: post #51
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…

PA-RISC was my favorite from that time. If it had the software stack of Sun commercial Unix might still be a thing.

I don't know a lot about PA-RISC, can you what was it about that ISA differentiated it?

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

#128

Post by spamizbad »

hawflakes wrote: post #82
spamizbad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PA-RISC was my favorite from that time. If it had the software stack of Sun commercial Unix might still be a thing.

Itanium was created precisely because HP thought it couldn't keep PA-RISC competitive. So they threw in with Intel to create the next great server architecture. As an aside, Merced too forever for Intel to tape out. Part of the agreements between HP and Intel was that they needed to ship chips for HP. As a result, Intel had to fab some of the last PA-RISC chips due to the schedule slip and contractual obligations. I…

Still, I wish HP hadn't given it up and maybe opened it up like SPARC. PA-RISC was posting some impressive numbers into the aughts when they were just multi-coring "old" designs.

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

#129

Post by bogomipz »

hawflakes wrote: post #82
spamizbad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PA-RISC was my favorite from that time. If it had the software stack of Sun commercial Unix might still be a thing.

Itanium was created precisely because HP thought it couldn't keep PA-RISC competitive. So they threw in with Intel to create the next great server architecture. As an aside, Merced too forever for Intel to tape out. Part of the agreements between HP and Intel was that they needed to ship chips for HP. As a result, Intel had to fab some of the last PA-RISC chips due to the schedule slip and contractual obligations. I…

>"Itanium was created precisely because HP thought it couldn't keep PA-RISC competitive."

I'd be curious to hear why that had that outlook. Wasn't HP still doing gangbuster's business at that point? Or was it something else besides having the financial resources?

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

#130

Post by codinger »

ghaff wrote: post #113
chx wrote: post #31

From almost exactly ten years ago: How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp > The MIPS chip, the DEC Alpha (perhaps the fastest chip of its era), and anything else in the pipeline were all cancelled or deemphasized. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it? > The failure of this chip to…

I'm not sure what point Dvorak is even making in that article. Yeah, a lot of ultimately wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64 plus a somewhat diminished set of CPUs from some of the big Unix vendors. It's an interesting question but I'm ultimately not sure that the computer industry would look all that different today had Intel just done 64-bit extensions to x86 or something similarly evolutio…

X86-64/AMD64 was solely developed by AMD and licensed to Intel.

I'm stating this because I can't tell what you mean by:

"wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64"

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