Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#181

Post by Keyframe » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 2:55 PM UTC

jpleger wrote: post #95

jmyeet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lesson here. Intel basically wanted to get away from x86 because it was licensed to AMD (and Cyrix) due to an earlier (and essentially unlimited) licensing agreement. In the late 90s, the likes of DEC, HP and Sun ruled the server and workstation space. Intel wanted in on this space and didn't want AMD to be able to produce compatible parts so... enter EPIC [1]. The projections (as you point to) were wildly…

I worked on a large scale project that was itanium based and let me tell you, the compilers / software toolchains were an absolute dumpster fire. We were planning on being between 500 and 2000 processors in our cluster. We used HP boxes and I want to say it was around 2002/2003 when this was going on. We were supposed to be a huge public showpiece client for both intel and HP. It… did not go very well. I remember the…

That's the tragedy behind it, since the whole premise on how Itanium was done was that compilers will be able to, eventually, any day now, optimize for it and then you'll see, just wait and then you'll see.. any day now!

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#182

Post by postmodest » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 3:03 PM UTC

sillywalk wrote: post #78

cy384 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've always wanted an Indy or an O2,but other than running the demos, I don't know what I'd do with them. Also, high-end kit is also interesting, but again, I kind of want an Altix (or Origin 2000/3000), or .AS/400 or a Tandem Cyclone.. just because it's neat. Do you have anything specific you'd do with an Altix 3000? (I don't mean to sound snooty)

I've had an Iris and an O2, and the sad fact is that your telephone is a faster computer than 100 O2's.

They're fun if you want to run the demos or load fsn and tell everyone in earshot "this is a Unix system! I know this!" But they're not even useful as X consoles to a Linux box these days, because of the compilation nightmare of getting recent network tools installed.

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#183

Post by postmodest » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #60

pram wrote: post #11

The Itanium sales forecasts never fail to make me laugh. Aged like the finest wine: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...

There's a lesson here. Intel basically wanted to get away from x86 because it was licensed to AMD (and Cyrix) due to an earlier (and essentially unlimited) licensing agreement. In the late 90s, the likes of DEC, HP and Sun ruled the server and workstation space. Intel wanted in on this space and didn't want AMD to be able to produce compatible parts so... enter EPIC [1]. The projections (as you point to) were wildly…

When I read about Itanium and iAPX 432, I can't help but think that Intel _isn't good at what they do_ and just lucked into he PC market by being cheap, and then riding to coattails of the Windows monopoly.

I can't wait for ARM to eat their lunch. And dinner.

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#184

Post by guiriduro » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 3:24 PM UTC

eigenvalue wrote: post #55

tux3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

In this situation I would assume that the political/internal pressures from the member companies and advisory board were dominating factors as opposed to the forecasters being total dummies. There must have been some reasons why it was not appealing to assume the growth could keep ramping like that. Because it’s an obviously insane forecast after the first few data points are in.

Similarly, anyone get the feeling the forecast for Hydrogen uptake (as an alternative fuel) has more to do with a self-serving politically and commercially motivated hype train than an honest assessment of its effectiveness that then drives organic uptake?

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#185

Post by tjalfi » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 3:26 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #131

bitwize wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Itanic was hype from the word go. Intel tried and failed twice to make "VLIW CPUs that rely on 'sufficiently smart' HLL compilers doing the right instruction packings" a thing before Itanium came along (iAPX 432 and i860). I think someone very high up at Intel was in love with the idea despite its repeated failures. Alpha was clearly the future -- and Itanic ruined Alpha. We didn't even get to see it live on inside s…

I hadn't heard about compiler vs 432 before, any links?

The blog entry Revisiting the Intel 432[0] and the cited paper Performance Effects of Architectural Complexity in the Intel 432[1] discuss the compiler issues.

[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/07/18/revisiting-the-intel...

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/45059.214411

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#186

Post by pm215 » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 3:28 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #121

o11c wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alpha was unequivocally terrible though. "Better than Itanium" is really not saying much. * no byte operations * no flags, thus no reasonable way to check for overflow (similar to one of the problems RISC-V is having, though at least they pretend to care).

Also “notoriously weak” memory model even as multithreading was taking off, and > The processor may lose track of your LDx_L if you perform any memory access other than a matching STx_C, or if you perform a branch instruction, or if you trigger a trap (such as executing an emulated instruction), or if you execute more than 20 instructions after the LDx_L. (LDxL and STxC are locked load and conditional store)

That is pretty standard for LL/SC instructions -- you'll find similar constraints on the Arm equivalent insns. In practice this doesn't matter because you only use them in a limited set of handcoded sequences to implement the atomic primitives you actually wanted, so you can always be sure that your LL/SC loop obeys the rules and makes forward progress.

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#187

Post by acdha » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 3:29 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #111

jpleger wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a large scale project that was itanium based and let me tell you, the compilers / software toolchains were an absolute dumpster fire. We were planning on being between 500 and 2000 processors in our cluster. We used HP boxes and I want to say it was around 2002/2003 when this was going on. We were supposed to be a huge public showpiece client for both intel and HP. It… did not go very well. I remember the…

There were plenty of people sceptical of Itanium at the time, including many within Intel as well. I guess we all gave Intel some benefits of the doubt. But the great thing is that the whole industry learned a lot from it. Intel did too. It is just sad a lot of this learning experience within Engineering never got promoted to C-Level Management at Intel.

> There were plenty of people sceptical of Itanium at the time, including many within Intel as well

Credit especially goes to the people who stayed on the various x86 processor teams. Itanium’s single greatest source of failure was that successive Penguin generations undercut the advantage of x86 compatibility by adding the option of not migrating at all and still getting better performance. They probably saved the company but I doubt that got much praise at the time since it required acknowledging how badly the Itanium project had failed.

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#188

Post by philjohn » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #145

ethbr1 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear someone chip in with what it takes to make a solar panel and the rate limiting factors. E.g. if a solar panel factory (simplifying into a single entity) already exists, is there any reason not to run it at 100% production capacity? What consumables are used?

Looked into getting solar panels last year and the problem wasn't getting the actual panels, but the hardware that let you integrate the panels to the electrical system. Spoke to several people who had had panels on their roof for months, but couldn't get the hardware that would let them connect them.

That definitely seems to be a little better now - in Europe at least lead times on inverters and batteries are tiny.

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#189

Post by philwelch » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 3:41 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #179

philwelch wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the recent history of the Texas power grid, the skepticism is more than warranted. The cost per megawatt of capacity for renewables is lower than other sources, but the power only gets generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, which means more reliable energy sources are priced out of being added to the grid. Our most recent near-miss at a statewide outage happened because of unexpectedly low…

That’s how the fossil fuel industry describes it, yes, but that’s just them trying to avoid competition. For example, the 2021 winter outages were caused by power plant operators not wanting to spend money making their plants more robust. During this summer’s heat dome, solar was reliable on days when gas, coal and nuclear power plants were offline due to the heat.

> That’s how the fossil fuel industry describes it, yes, but that’s just them trying to avoid competition.

Renewables, especially construction of new renewables, is a big, lucrative, growing business of its own. That’s actually a direct implication of the triumphant statistics people keep sharing about how much renewable power generation gets built out every year. So the “fossil fuel industry” is not unique in its vested interest to propagandize against its competition. And this incentive is only increased by the movement towards ESG in finance. But if we’re done accusing each other of being shills, let’s get to the substance of the matter at hand here.

> For example, the 2021 winter outages were caused by power plant operators not wanting to spend money making their plants more robust.

This included the renewables too, of course, along with the entire rest of the state’s infrastructure. But the near outage this summer was directly caused by low wind. There are probably issues with solar as well—heat, and cooling demand along with it, peak in the early evening just as sunlight starts to diminish—but usually wind manages to cover that gap. That doesn’t always happen though.

Re: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

#190

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

FullyFunctional wrote: post #29

jabl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my limited understanding two factors contributed significantly to Alpha failing. Business-wise, DEC and Ken Olesen were stuck in an old minicomputer mentality and wasn't sufficiently able or willing to "let it loose" and let it take over the market with DEC as the CPU supplier. Technically, Alpha development was taking longer and longer and the schedule slips got worse and worse.

The Prism/Alpha project was one long series of disasters. Prism was delayed because the spec kept changing and the architecture had to run on VLSI and ECL - which was already a huge mistake. There was also resistance from the VAX partisans.

So when samples arrived they were 2-3 years later than they should have been and MIPs had made some headway in the same space.

DEC - actually Bob Supnik - decided that even though Prism was the better arch, MIPS products would bring in revenue more quickly.

Which was true. But... then Prism was killed, which led to a mass walkout. The remains were resurrected a year later with some updates as Alpha. But by then it was too late for that particular market.

Prism was a solid arch - some quirks, but nothing unworkable. And very, very fast.

But it was a workstation-grade processor, not a mainstream PC-grade processor.

DEC completely failed to understand the PC market, and it's not obvious what would have happened if Prism had survived. IMO it would have gone the way of MIPS anyway, because the workstation market was already being squeezed hard, and the PC and Mac markets had already made their choices.

It might have had a good run against SPARC for a decade or so, but that would have been it.