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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

#171

Post by lisper »

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 being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe designs possible

IMHO, as someone who cares about security, that's not necessarily a bad thing. (I do lament the passing of tagged architectures, but that ship sailed a long, long time ago.)

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

#172

Post by achiang »

gumby wrote: post #65
ghaff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people have good jobs supporting and incrementally enhancing legacy products and product lines of various kinds in software, computer hardware, and in many other areas. It’s mostly a Silicon Valley concept that if you’re not working on something ground-breaking you’re wasting your life. And how many people at some of those big SV companies are mostly just working on ad tech?

True, my point is that itanium itself was a laughingstock, and clearly with no future, so must have been embarrassing to talk to your friends about what you do for work. Making spare parts for the B-52, or maintaining security fixes for Solaris (which has its fanatic fans) can be rewarding, no question. But to work on the Itanium any time in the last decade must have been soul-sucking.

I was an HP-UX kernel engineer from 2002 til 2005, a brief interlude writing IA64 CPU diagnostics, and then and a Linux kernel engineer from 2007 til 2010, all on Itanium systems.

In that time frame, it wasn't clear that horizontal scale out architecture (aka "the cloud") was going to dominate, and that scale up systems were going the way of the mainframe. The thinking was that there would always be a healthy balance of scale out vs scale up, and btw, HP alone did $30B+ revenue yearly on scale up with very slow decline, just like the mainframe market, which is still $10B+, even today.

To put that in today's terms, if you pitched a startup with a $30B TAM, VCs will definitely be returning your emails.

So no, it wasn't embarrassing to talk about working on IPF any moreso than it would be to talk about POWER today. It's just another CPU architecture with some interesting properties but ultimately failed in the market place. Just like Transmeta or Lisp Machines.

What should be embarrassing, but clearly is not, is to slag off entire industries not knowing shit about them.

Edit: I think working on B-52 parts would be an amazingly fun job.

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

#173

Post by watersb »

kabdib wrote: post #133
ch_123 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. I think the i432 would be a worthy challenger to that title https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432

I think of the iAPX 432 as "over-designed and under-engineered". Intel was writing architectural checks (bit-aligned instructions, capability-based permissions, "everything is an object") they couldn't cash (very, very bad performance). I'm a software guy, so naturally I took a course in VLSI design in college. It was fun. This was maybe a year before the iAPX 432 was canceled; our teacher had some sample chips embed…

"I'm a ____, so naturally I took a course in ______" opens up so many possibilities for me.

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

#174

Post by burfog »

abecedarius wrote: post #141
microcolonel wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And EFI is a good thing, especially considering the monster dumpster fire that is UEFI? Well it may be a dumpster fire, but it is the finest, most consistent flame we've gotten from the firmware dumpster; which is why it is fast becoming the only standard firmware interface in actual use . UEFI is fast becoming the standard for ARMv8, it's creeping back to ARMv7, and it's becoming popular with RISC-V. You will eith…

Not that I've ever coded firmware, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware sounded nice.

It was FORTH, which most developers really hated. Sometimes the end users even got exposed to bits of FORTH poking out, for example in the syntax for booting.

We really just wanted a nice clean 64-bit BIOS, with all the datatypes 64-bit. The BIOS is pretty decent if you strip out redundant interfaces, segmentation, and never-used functionality. Adding extra functionality to firmware is madness. Firmware needs to initialize key hardware like RAM, load a boot loader, and get out of the way. Firmware doesn't need to be practically an OS.

The old 16-bit BIOS was actually working OK. Sure, it was nasty to program for, but almost nobody had to deal with that.

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

#175

Post by graybored »

gumby wrote: post #65
ghaff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people have good jobs supporting and incrementally enhancing legacy products and product lines of various kinds in software, computer hardware, and in many other areas. It’s mostly a Silicon Valley concept that if you’re not working on something ground-breaking you’re wasting your life. And how many people at some of those big SV companies are mostly just working on ad tech?

True, my point is that itanium itself was a laughingstock, and clearly with no future, so must have been embarrassing to talk to your friends about what you do for work. Making spare parts for the B-52, or maintaining security fixes for Solaris (which has its fanatic fans) can be rewarding, no question. But to work on the Itanium any time in the last decade must have been soul-sucking.

in my experience, the embarassement of a job doesnt come from the technology you are working with.

it comes from the people you are working with, and the people you are serving as customers, and whether these stakeholders are being treated well and having their needs met.

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

#176

Post by watersb »

microcolonel wrote: post #150
abecedarius wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I've ever coded firmware, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware sounded nice.

Open Firmware was beautiful, but if you're not on POWER, you're probably not going to see it.

Sun SPARC workstations used it. I wonder how many of those are still in use?

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

#177

Post by burfog »

tyingq wrote: post #35
Theodores wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chuckled. Which was silly as I missed the boat with Linux until Ubuntu came along. The versions of Linux I first saw were mere toys compared to the SGI awesomeness I knew at the time.

Oh, yeah. I did not see it with early Linux, and like you, thought it was a fun toy. It was specifically the 64 bit x86 thing that caught my attention. The memory ceiling for 32 bit x86 made it easy to ignore Linux. If I remember right, Linux was also still crashing pretty regularly under load just before that time frame too.

Before that time frame, PC hardware vendors had little incentive to make stable hardware. It was easy to blame crashes on Windows. If the hardware itself made a few crashes per week, that wasn't going to be enough to be noticed.

The early 64-bit PC hardware was server grade, intended for NT and Linux. That set a standard, and then gradually people moved away from junk like Windows 98SE and Windows ME. Hardware bugs no longer had such an easy time hiding in a flood of software crashes.

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

#178

Post by jabl »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #112
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.

> They shouldn't have killed an excellent processor (the Alpha) Parallel Alpha systems are a pain to deal with, because they lack a form of expected synchronization that every other processor has: automatic data dependency barriers. On every other platform, if you initialize or otherwise write to a value, then make a pointer point to that value, you can expect that anyone reading through that pointer gets the initial…

Had alpha not died, they could have tightened the memory model.

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

#179

Post by pjmlp »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #115
pjmlp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. :) We used it for a Clipper based management application. My first task was bringing back to life our school labs network, so that we could use it for that application, got to love those coaxial cable terminators.

Clipper! I didn't listen anything about Clipper since 90s

I used Summer87, 5.x in school assignments and early contract work, also got a copy of Visual Objects, but ended up trying to do the app in VB instead.

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

#180

Post by ghaff »

chx wrote: post #170
ghaff wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel was independently developing 64-bit extensions under the code name Yamhill. I know there some legal settlements around the time so they may have cross-licensed technology. AMD came out first but Intel had much the same thing in its back pocket. What I last statement meant was we ended up by an industry dominated by 64-bit x86 anyway in spite of all the effort that went into an alternative 64-bit architecture. S…

What ...? Yamhill was an answer to AMD64. The first rumors appeared in 2002 where AMD announced AMD64 in 1999, released the full specs in 2000 and actually shipped the first Opteron CPU in 2003 April, Intel shipped the Nocona in June 2004. This trailing remained for a while -- LAHF/SAHF in 64 bit was shipped in March 2005 by AMD but only December 2005 by Intel.

Well sure. Intel much preferred Itanium to succeed. Absent AMD, it’s possuble Itanium would have muddled through in the end. (Or something completely different would have played out.)

it’s safe to say that Intel has some sort of contingency plan going back quite a while. Some analysts even thought they saw features in Pentium that suggested 64-bit readiness.

But it wasn’t until Opteron’s success and its adoption by esp. HP and Dell that Intel felt they needed to make their 64 bit extensions plan public.

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