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Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

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Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#81

Post by monocasa »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #28
kmeisthax wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's doubly funny knowing that basically nobody bothers doing these kinds of workloads on CPU if they can help it. And everything you have to do to get GPU floating point performance also makes GPUs really, really bad for normal CPU code. Hell, at one point AMD actually was shipping VLIW for shader code...

> It's doubly funny knowing that basically nobody bothers doing these kinds of workloads on CPU if they can help it. When the Itanium was developed and introduced (2001), nobody was thinking about general-purpose computations. DirectX 8.0, which introduced Shader Model 1.1 (which was far away from being suitable for GPGPU; Shader Model 1.1 was rather about strongly (also size-)limited programs for the vertex and pixe…

Yes, but even farther back. Apparently the Pentium Pro team was forked off to work on Itanium in the mid 90s. At that point a GPU was at best just the rasterizer and ROP phases from an acceleration perspective.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#82

Post by aleph_minus_one »

monocasa wrote: post #81
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's doubly funny knowing that basically nobody bothers doing these kinds of workloads on CPU if they can help it. When the Itanium was developed and introduced (2001), nobody was thinking about general-purpose computations. DirectX 8.0, which introduced Shader Model 1.1 (which was far away from being suitable for GPGPU; Shader Model 1.1 was rather about strongly (also size-)limited programs for the vertex and pixe…

Yes, but even farther back. Apparently the Pentium Pro team was forked off to work on Itanium in the mid 90s. At that point a GPU was at best just the rasterizer and ROP phases from an acceleration perspective.

> At that point a GPU was at best just the rasterizer and ROP phases from an acceleration perspective.

For those who are not so deep into GPU architecture:

ROP: Raster Operation Pipeline

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Render_output_uni...

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#83

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

lode wrote: post #58
corvad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might need some background on this one.

Never heard of this one either. FCKGW on the other hand still triggers muscle memory.

I had FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 memorized too but I used XGCJ6 more often. Mostly for Virtual PCs that I was converting to hyper-v guests.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#84

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

corvad wrote: post #47
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #38

XGCJ6-Q6XGJ-BQ2QQ-BRWJ7-67X7W I used to have this key memorized.

Might need some background on this one.

> Might need some background on this one.

It's a VLK. During early XP days, Volume License Keys were widely accepted and when using them, XP would show as activated.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#85

Post by stinkbeetle »

p_l wrote: post #75
stinkbeetle wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh you must be right, I mix up my time lines. In any case the economics were more or less the same as Alpha as for the others. They couldn't support integrated silicon manufacturing. It wasn't even just the manufacturing (which could be outsourced although arguably not as competitively as integrated shops like Intel until TSMC really hit its stride). Or the logic and physical design. But the software development and…

Windows on Alpha and FX!32 were reasonably solid options, as was the general health of the Alpha ecosystem. The platform also was not overextended in dot-com boom as much as let's say Sun. Windows port was also pretty early, even if it was 32bit limited. The big benefit for EV6 was that it had actual parts commonality with PC, and I do not mean few I/O chips like some of the others (SuperIO, network, etc.) but northb…

FX!32 was not good. DEC's own paper only provided results for "Byte Benchmark" (nbench) which is a few trivial compute kernels. Even that most favorable test they could find showed 500MHz 21164A performed about the same as a Pentium Pro 200, the core that would the next year be in consumer CPUs. It was also NT only, at the time not used for PCs. It's just not enough to be "as good" in a scenario like that where not only are you are massively disadvantaged by costs, but you have to break into existing markets.

EV7 and EV8 development did not go well either, costs and complexity was blowing out, EV7 slipped 18 months and planned 130nm shrink was not able to hit performance targets. EV8 was enormous and expensive totally unsuited to mass market commodity bottoms-up path of Intel, and exemplifies their retreat into high end niche rather than accept and embrace commoditization.

AMD licensed the EV6 bus, but of course there was no socket/pin compatibility between AMD and Alpha parts. So they still didn't have commodity motherboards, though that would only be one small part of the puzzle if they did have.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#86

Post by stinkbeetle »

spijdar wrote: post #71
stinkbeetle wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh you must be right, I mix up my time lines. In any case the economics were more or less the same as Alpha as for the others. They couldn't support integrated silicon manufacturing. It wasn't even just the manufacturing (which could be outsourced although arguably not as competitively as integrated shops like Intel until TSMC really hit its stride). Or the logic and physical design. But the software development and…

I think you're right overall that Itanium is used too often as the reason why all the RISC platforms died/were cancelled, as if they would have had healthy futures had Itanium simply not existed, but I do wonder about Alpha. I wasn't around at the time, so I don't know what availability and pricing actually looked like, but unlike the other RISC platforms, Alpha was actually available on PC-like systems, with PCI and…

> I think you're right overall that Itanium is used too often as the reason why all the RISC platforms died/were cancelled, as if they would have had healthy futures had Itanium simply not existed, but I do wonder about Alpha.

Alpha had no fundamental differences that would have enabled it to avoid the same problem as the others IMO.

> I wasn't around at the time, so I don't know what availability and pricing actually looked like, but unlike the other RISC platforms,

No that's not true, other RISCs had similar, even before Alpha was on the designboard. They all did RISC workstations, Sun, SGI, even HP and IBM. IBM most famously went into PowerPC with Apple and Motorola early on, and then also did CPUs for several games consoles.

IBM probably of all of them understood the commoditization fight and they tried to put up a fight, but even they couldn't keep ahead of it. Alpha couldn't have.

> Alpha was actually available on PC-like systems, with PCI and ISA busses, and x86 emulation at the firmware layer, allowing regular PC peripherals like VGA cards to work. Windows and, significantly, Linux, had pretty superb support for Alpha.

Just too expensive to produce for what it did. Why would you use it for a Windows or Linux machine if you could do the same with a Pentium or K6 that actually ran your games and word processors and other stuff.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#87

Post by stinkbeetle »

pjmlp wrote: post #69
stinkbeetle wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes NeXT/Apple survive, although they commodity m68k CPUs, not quite your traditional UNIX minicomputer. Those were IBM, Sun, HP, DEC, maybe SGI. Designed their own ISAs, CPUs, interconnect fabric, 3 of them did their own silicon manufacturing. One does still survive though, that's IBM's POWER / AIX. Still actively developed, though there is the feeling of 'when' rather than 'if' for them too.

I did not count AIX / Solaris in, because they are always some racks in a server room, or the whole IBM / Unisys / Fujitsu for that matter. I was only thinking about UNIX workstations, those under/besides the desk. Otherwise you're right, there are few more options available still.

Not true, they all did workstations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RS/6000

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1fz29tx/r...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_IRIS#MIPS

https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-9000_720_730_750.html

Apple (or NeXT) were never vertically integrated back then. In the last 6 years with Apple making their own CPUs for OSX you could call them a vertically integrated UNIX shop. Not minicomputer though, which is from my post you replied to. Apple was not a vertically integrated vendor that survived bottom-up attack, they attacked Intel from bottom up via mobile/smartphone cores in a similar way Intel did to the minicomputers.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#88

Post by p_l »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #85
p_l wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows on Alpha and FX!32 were reasonably solid options, as was the general health of the Alpha ecosystem. The platform also was not overextended in dot-com boom as much as let's say Sun. Windows port was also pretty early, even if it was 32bit limited. The big benefit for EV6 was that it had actual parts commonality with PC, and I do not mean few I/O chips like some of the others (SuperIO, network, etc.) but northb…

FX!32 was not good. DEC's own paper only provided results for "Byte Benchmark" (nbench) which is a few trivial compute kernels. Even that most favorable test they could find showed 500MHz 21164A performed about the same as a Pentium Pro 200, the core that would the next year be in consumer CPUs. It was also NT only, at the time not used for PCs. It's just not enough to be "as good" in a scenario like that where not o…

FX!32 was good compared to what was available elsewhere (including for Itanium IIRC). I am not saying it had to compete with fully with x86 on consumer desktops from beginning, but it would have been more stable position, especially with known upcoming work on 64bit-clean NT5.

EV7 I am interested in more details because I want to know if the slippage was part of the original development run, or the post-Itanium one when it was restarted by HP. EV8 was admittedly dead in the water but I would say not so much for technical reasons as much as for direction options available (vs. following the samsung partnership to bring more AlphaPC-like systems)

The motherboard difference was slight between K7 and EV6 parts from my understanding if there was a will to commit to large scale production (arguably EV67 could be probably made into pin-compatible packaging even). But admittedly small part.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#89

Post by nticompass »

sedatk wrote: post #5

A historical note: Windows XP 64-bit Edition that was mentioned in the article, was Itanium-specific. It was based on XP kernel while Windows XP x64 Edition (for AMD64 architecture) was based on Windows Server 2003 kernel. Because of that, Windows XP x64 Edition had some significantly different performance characteristics compared to other Windows XP editions. If anything, it was closer to Vista than XP in some aspec…

I ran Windows XP x64 Edition on a computer for a while and some software didn't like it. Since it was technically NT 5.2 (Server 2003) and not NT 5.1 (XP), some programs/installers would complain that it wasn't compatible. So, it was cool to have a 64-bit Windows XP, it was annoying to get stuff to run on it.

Re: Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

#90

Post by stinkbeetle »

p_l wrote: post #88
stinkbeetle wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FX!32 was not good. DEC's own paper only provided results for "Byte Benchmark" (nbench) which is a few trivial compute kernels. Even that most favorable test they could find showed 500MHz 21164A performed about the same as a Pentium Pro 200, the core that would the next year be in consumer CPUs. It was also NT only, at the time not used for PCs. It's just not enough to be "as good" in a scenario like that where not o…

FX!32 was good compared to what was available elsewhere (including for Itanium IIRC). I am not saying it had to compete with fully with x86 on consumer desktops from beginning, but it would have been more stable position, especially with known upcoming work on 64bit-clean NT5. EV7 I am interested in more details because I want to know if the slippage was part of the original development run, or the post-Itanium one w…

> FX!32 was good compared to what was available elsewhere (including for Itanium IIRC). I am not saying it had to compete with fully with x86 on consumer desktops from beginning, but it would have been more stable position, especially with known upcoming work on 64bit-clean NT5.

I meant not good compared with what was available elsewhere, i.e., actual x86 CPUs. It didn't emulate privileged modes, so none of your operating systems worked, it required Windows NT, and it only provided emulation for Win32 x86 binaries, and it did not emulate all facilities either. Independent benchmarks are not easy to come by, but even the few results published by DEC were not fantastic. A 500MHz Alpha (likely EV6) would achieve maybe little better performance than a 200MHz Pentium (P5, not PPro)! EV6 did 2.66x specint95/MHz that Pentium MMX 200 achived, and 2.5x the frequency. Natively it would havehave been 5.32x faster on those benchmarks, but it was a little over 1.x. This is not the 40-60% performance claimed of the trivial byte benchmark result, this is 20% performance at best.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3214997_FX32_a_prof...

The slip was the original development AFAIK. HP later restarted a failed process shrink I think, but I can't remember if they finally got that done in the end.

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