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Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
- leetrout 8y agoThe end of an era and one of the worst technology bets / choices. Every time I hear Itanium I think of SGI going under.
- tyingq 8y agoThe original RISC/Unix players were most of my career. Pyramid MIPS/OSX, then Sparc/SunOS, AIX, PA-RISC/HPUX, Dec Ultrix followed by Alpha, etc. I remember trying to tell my co-workers that Linux would wipe it all out, shortly after AMD rolled out Opteron. Most of them chuckled.
- neverartful 8y agoWhich of those proprietary systems were your favorite (or hated least) and why? Which did you dislike the most?
- tyingq 8y agoI liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it much easier to find help from other people, Makefiles that just worked, SSL accelerator boards, etc. Ask anyone that worked with zones, for example, and we find all the buzz about docker and linux containers quite funny. I probably hated AIX the most. It was tantalizingly close to other Unix implementations, but with enough differences that things would sort-of work, but not really. To be fair, there was a "right" way to do things that worked, but I was naturally trying to use knowledge I already had. It was also the platform most likely to bomb out when trying to compile open source software. Lots of tweaking makefiles, environment variables, compiler flags, etc, to get things to work. They had a sysadmin tool called "smitty" that I particularly hated.
- classichasclass 8y agoInteresting. I've been an AIX dweeb since 3.2.5 and it's actually my favourite proprietary Unix mostly because it's so ornery. I still have a POWER6 running it that handles most of my web and mail tasks. In fact, I tend to develop on it since if it works on AIX it will be portable enough to work other places. That said, I like xlc performance but I despise its weird command line options. I mostly just use gcc on AIX also. I do prefer smit to things like HP-UX sam, but I'm accustomed to IBM overengineering. ;)
- kjs3 8y agoYeah...AIX is industrial strength. Unfortunately, lots of people really want 'run in my parents basement strength'.
- peatmoss 8y agoMy early career involved compiling a lot of software that would have been better run on Linux or some BSD variant for AIX. I can confirm that building stuff like a custom Apache stack on AIX (don’t ask) was like pulling teeth using XLC. I’m not really old enough to be an actual grey beard, but I got just enough hands-on experience with late-period Big Commercial Unix to feel like I at least swept floors and fetched coffee in the exclusive club. Cool, even if it was frustrating at times. I guess that is the thing: we’ve settled into a monoculture that makes me deeply uncomfortable. NeXT won the desktop, but there’s only implementation. And Linux won the server. But in the meantime, I feel like only OpenBSD is credibly providing public infrastructure that everyone uses. I kind of worry that we’re heading toward a world in which nobody really understands the guts of the systems that sit underneath modern cloud / containerized services. Furthermore, because that stuff isn’t as exciting as the Javascript framework de jure, the amount of innovation happening in the lower layers is nonexistent.
- tyingq 8y agoThe monoculture is a good observation. Aside from the dangers you mention, the death of commercial Unix also killed off a lot of healthy competition. There used to be, for example, lots of incentive for HP, IBM, Sun, and others to tweak hardware and software to keep at the top of TPC-C benchmarks. Edit: Well, also the security implications of the Linux/x86 monoculture.
- classichasclass 8y agoThe 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.
- anarazel 8y agoPA-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 ;)
- tyingq 8y agoI 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 https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FutexImplementation
- Theodores 8y agoI 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.
- tyingq 8y agoOh, 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.
- burfog 8y agoBefore 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.
- icelancer 8y agoI figured it out right around Slackware becoming a big distro; that would be in the late 90s / early 2000s. It was pretty clear to me, but I was young and a new entrant to the industry.
- classichasclass 8y agoSGI's Itanic workstations were pretty anaemic, too. They only looked good compared to the phone-it-in R10K derivatives they were pooting out around that time. I'd rather have had a Tezro than a Virtu any day.
- tyingq 8y agoSo HPUX finally dies. Doesn't leave much of the original commercial RISC/Unix players still on some level of life support. I guess there's still AIX/Power.
- anonymfus 8y agoWhat stops HP from porting it to other architectures?
- tyingq 8y agoDemand. 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.
- mrpippy 8y agoExactly. Whereas porting away from OpenVMS is a lot of effort, so it's worth the effort for VMS Software to port OpenVMS to x86_64
- jandrese 8y agoIf 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.
- protomyth 8y agoLast I looked, they were porting HP/UX over to x86. The port came up in the whole HP vs Oracle lawsuit.
- ch_123 8y agoThere was talk of this, but it went away. The last suggestion I’ve read about were some kind of ‘containers’ which emulate HP-UX https://www.pcworld.com/article/3196353/data-center/hpe-offers-an-escape-from-the-aging-hp-ux-os-via-containers.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/3196353/data-center/hpe-offe... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project_kinetic/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_projec...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- q3k 8y agoMixed 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 designs possible: IA32/amd64. ARM was kinda quirky (conditional execution, barrel shifter), but those were slowly neutered (by introducing Thumb), and then totally thrown out of the window with aarch64. SPARC is dead. PA-RISC is dead. RISC-V is new and promising, but is also the most pragmatic and safe design of an ISA ever. The Mill CPU is interesting, but is underfunded and I don't think it will ever be taped out. Similar as with OS research (think: Solaris, Plan9/Inferno), researchy and experimental CPU ISAs seem to be a thing of the past now.
- roblabla 8y agoOS research is still active though. I see many interesting microkernels being developed left right and center. RedoxOS is trying to build a unix microkernel. Nintendo built Horizon, a capabilities-based microkernel for the Nintendo Switch. Many of Plan9's features have been incorporated into Linux. We have seL4, a formally proven kernel that is still in active development (they are currently working hard on getting a formally proven SMP component). I don't think it's fair to say Kernel research is a thing of the past.
- ddtaylor 8y agoIt's x86 all the way down.
- johnklos 8y agoThey 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.
- skynetv2 8y agoagreed, Itanium investment should have gone to the Alpha. Itanium was really good at raw performance as long as you could write hand tuned math kernels or kept working with the compiler team to optimize code for your kernel. Took me a while, but I got 97% efficiency with single core DGEMM.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoHand-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.
- zamalek 8y ago> 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.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoI’m not sure how many people, but it’s all the compiler group at HP did for the last twenty years.
- Something1234 8y agoHP 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.
- baybal2 8y agoPeople have to admit that "Itanic" was a just name for it.
- chx 8y agoFrom almost exactly ten years ago: How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp 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 do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel—and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level. > It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above. The next level was the basement, in fact. Hopefully Intel won't come up with any more bright ideas like the Itanium. We can't afford to excavate another level down.
- ghaff 8y agoI'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 evolutionary. AMD might well not exist. But, except for HP, the big Unix vendors mostly hedged their bets anyway. The large Japanese companies who also backed Itanium never were going to make the investments to break out beyond Japan.
- jandrese 8y agoBlaming Itanium for killing all of the bespoke RISC processors from the 90s is a stretch IMHO. Low cost high power x86 architecture chips were a much bigger factor. Nobody had the stomach to pay $70k (plus $20k/year for the mandatory support contract) for a "workstation" that was slower than a $4k PC, especially once Linux got good. Intel's good luck and heavy investment in shrinking node sizes also made it impossible for niche companies to keep up. They were doomed to be slow power hogs in their attempt to keep up with commodity x86 processors.
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- pinewurst 8y agoBack in 2012, Oracle published some interesting (and IMHO amusing) internal HP documents re Intel and ongoing Itanium development. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/itanium-346707.html http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/itanium-346707.h...
- gumby 8y agoI wonder what it’s like working on Itanium over the last decade (and perhaps earlier). I can see someone joining early on when the marketing buzz was exciting and reality had not set in. But now...you’re working on a product that is widely mocked and has no future, yet releases are still being made. How depressing...what causes someone to stay on?
- ghaff 8y agoA 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?
- gumby 8y agoTrue, 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.
- Denvercoder9 8y ago> so must have been embarrassing to talk to your friends about what you do for work. Not everyone's identity is based on what they work on.
- achiang 8y agoI 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.
- ttul 8y agoI got to work with one of the first Itanium machines back in 2000 working as an intern. My job was to port Perl to IA-64. It was an amazingly fast machine - like living a few years into the future. I can see why it failed to gain mass traction, but that’s a shame. IA-64 was so innovative.
- macintux 8y agoHP paid my employer (Progeny) to help port Debian packages to an early Itanium system. I don’t remember thinking it was fast at all, but maybe my memory is colored by later miseries.
- ithkuil 8y agoOpenVMS port to x86-64 still work in progress: http://www.openvms.org/node/111 http://www.openvms.org/node/111
- justin66 8y agoTheir last update is from 16 months ago?
- Aloha 8y agoNo, there are more recent updates: https://www.vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html https://www.vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html
- rocky1138 8y agoI was surprised to see this so far down the comments chain. What will OpenVMS do without Itanium?
- ghaff 8y agoAs the parent indicates they're porting it to x86-64. I've been away from following HP proprietary systems for almost 10 years but they put a plan in place quite a while ago when it became obvious that Itanium had no future. Remember that systems in this space don't need to be the latest and greatest. They need a long support roadmap but it's mostly fine if hardware is on the older side.
- Aloha 8y agoBetter Link: https://www.vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html https://www.vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html
- tapland 8y agoWell, guess we'll hope for that X86 OpenVMS to be released soon then.
- robk 8y agoGoodbye Itanic
- hestefisk 8y agoR.I.P. Itanic.
- uhrlocher 8y agohttps://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-... https://www.newsweek.com/2016/06/17/silicon-valley-takeover-468182.html https://www.newsweek.com/2016/06/17/silicon-valley-takeover-... https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy/why-im-leaving-silicon-valley-72919edb3297 https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy/why-im-leaving-silicon-... https://getlighthouse.com/blog/silicon-valley-bad-managers/ https://getlighthouse.com/blog/silicon-valley-bad-managers/ https://www.philanthropy.com/article/A-Star-Performer-Created-a/243159 https://www.philanthropy.com/article/A-Star-Performer-Create... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/a-valley-too-far-is-the-toxic-culture-of-the-tech-world-beyond-repair/article35610645/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/internati... https://www.geekwire.com/2018/emily-chang-brotopia-silicon-valley-companies-can-tackle-toxic-culture/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/emily-chang-brotopia-silicon-v... https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297481 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297481 https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/03/11/bro-culture-poisoning-silicon-valley/ https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/03/11/bro-culture-poison... https://www.quora.com/Is-the-culture-in-the-Silicon-Valley-becoming-increasingly-toxic?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Is-the-culture-in-the-Silicon-Valley-b... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/ellen-pao-memoir-silicon-valley-toxic-culture https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/ellen-pao-memoir-sil... https://www.recode.net/2018/2/5/16972096/emily-chang-brotopia-book-bloomberg-technology-culture-silicon-valley-kara-swisher-decode-podcast https://www.recode.net/2018/2/5/16972096/emily-chang-brotopi... https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Silicon-Valley-Community-Foundation-Reviews-E331546.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Silicon-Valley-Community-F... https://www.wired.com/story/everyone-hates-silicon-valley-except-its-imitators/ https://www.wired.com/story/everyone-hates-silicon-valley-ex... https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/silicon-valley-has-lost-its-soul https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/silicon-valley... https://yourstory.com/2017/07/silicon-valley-bro-culture/ https://yourstory.com/2017/07/silicon-valley-bro-culture/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-quiet-efforts-to-battle-silicon-valleys-bro-culture-1541943938 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-quiet-efforts-to-battle-sil... https://thebolditalic.com/a-source-of-sorrow-in-silicon-valley-1a81ccd80ac2?gi=bc741a45779e https://thebolditalic.com/a-source-of-sorrow-in-silicon-vall... https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/25/is-silicon-valley-the-real-villain-in-the-theranos.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/25/is-... https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/silicon-valley-become-next-detroit-struggles-survive-toxic-mess-created/ https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/silicon-valley-become-next-... https://builttoadapt.io/so-you-want-to-build-a-silicon-valley-like-software-developer-culture-focus-on-the-people-809ddf4c426a?gi=af0b0c66fd4f https://builttoadapt.io/so-you-want-to-build-a-silicon-valle... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3-bMDaMhLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3-bMDaMhLg https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/01/silicon-valley-sexual-harassment-startups https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/01/silicon-valley... https://www.indiewire.com/2018/07/silicon-valley-actress-alice-wetterlund-t-j-miller-co-stars-enabled-bullying-1201985168/# https://www.indiewire.com/2018/07/silicon-valley-actress-ali...! https://www.theneweconomy.com/technology/silicons-sexist-brogrammer-culture-is-locking-women-out-of-tech https://www.theneweconomy.com/technology/silicons-sexist-bro... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17051800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17051800 https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/sections/schools/210-school-features/55819- https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/sections/schools/210-sch...
- InclinedPlane 8y agoItanium represents a classic case of jumping architectures and committing too soon. Any mature system represents not just the sum of a huge amount of design work but also an untold number of hours (years really) of beta testing, bug fixing, and iterative refinement. A new system may be built on a better foundation but more often than not in its immature state it will still have shortcomings until it's been through a long period of "burn-in" and bug fixing.
- arnon 8y agoIt's interesting that it was actually AMD that kept the Intel x86-64 architecture alive. Intel knew that the x86 architecture was limited in time, and tried to kill it off with the the 64-bit Itanium. AMD had a different plan, and released 64-bit capable x86 processors, obstructing Intel’s plans to dominate with Itanium. I think this is key to why Itanium never caught on, and why writing software for it is so hard.
- paulie_a 8y agoHonestly I thought they ditched the itanic a decade ago.
- kijiki 8y agoItanic inspired what is unquestionably the best graph-based trolling of bullshit marketing ever: https://regmedia.co.uk/2004/09/19/itanium_sales_small.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2004/09/19/itanium_sales_small.jpg Wikipedia has an updated version as well: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_edit.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...