4 ms·

> I really wish Itanium had taken off. IMO it is a superior architecture that was simply ahead of it's time. Itanium was an architecture that was designed for

> I really wish Itanium had taken off. IMO it is a superior architecture that was simply ahead of it's time. Itanium was an architecture that was designed for "big iron", i.e. fast, powerful computers. It is thus, in my opinion, much harder to "scale down" to, say, mobile devices than x86.

unlinked_dll 7y ago
x86 hasn't really proven that it scales down well for mobile devices either.
- toast0 7y ago
  There are some x86 Android phones, and Windows 10 Mobile's Continuum looked designed to be run on an x86 phone, but Intel killed that line of processors before Microsoft built a device.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  Intel produced SoCs for mobile devices, concretely Speatrum SC9853i and Spreadtrum SC9861G-IA. If you want to scale even further down, consider Intel Quark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark). For an analysis why it failed in the market, consider http://linuxgizmos.com/who-killed-the-quark/ http://linuxgizmos.com/who-killed-the-quark/ To me, it seems that the central reason why these chips failed commercially is that at the lower end, SoCs offer a much thinner margins than CPUs for laptops, desktop PCs and servers.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  My friend uses Asus Zenfone which runs on Intel CPU. It works fine. Intel might have failed with economics or marketing, but engineering works.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Interestingly enough, the baseband for iPhone XS runs x86.
cogman10 7y ago
I'd say the opposite is true. There isn't anything about Itanium that makes it worse for mobile. In fact, the opposite is true, it would be better for mobile because it was designed to push more of the optimizations into the compiler vs the hardware. That means less power required to do optimizations against running software. Because Itanium fits with mobile just as well as ARM does for much of the same reasons. After all, Itanium is essentially a RISC architecture. It never touched mobile because it was dead before mobile computing was really taking off. Heck, it was dead before ARM got a stranglehold on the market.
- PeCaN 7y ago
  > There isn't anything about Itanium that makes it worse for mobile. Shit code density?
- burfog 7y ago
  Mobile is expected to run JIT translated code. Itanium's design was finalized before JIT became important. Suddenly JIT was everywhere and spreading: Java, C# .net CLR stuff, Javascript, and more. JIT output can not be well-optimized because that takes too long. The code must compile while the end-user waits, so there is no time to do anything good. The code will be terrible. Itanium can't handle that.
- acdha 7y ago
  > There isn't anything about Itanium that makes it worse for mobile. In fact, the opposite is true, it would be better for mobile because it was designed to push more of the optimizations into the compiler vs the hardware. That means less power required to do optimizations against running software. There's a big problem with that: the VLIW layout is not as memory efficient so programs were larger and the instruction cache needed to be larger to compensate. Mobile architectures have traditionally had smaller caches and less memory bandwidth to save power. There is an interesting what-if question here: one of the big things which killed Itanium was the poor x86 compatibility meaning that while it was not entirely uncompetitive when running highly-optimized native code, it was massively slower for legacy apps even before you factored in the price. Compiler technology has improved by a huge degree since the 90s and in particular it's interesting to imagine would could happen in an Apple AppStore-style environment where developers ship LLVM bitcode which is recompiled for the target device, substantially avoiding the need to run legacy code.

unlinked_dll 7y ago

x86 hasn't really proven that it scales down well for mobile devices either.

toast0 7y ago
There are some x86 Android phones, and Windows 10 Mobile's Continuum looked designed to be run on an x86 phone, but Intel killed that line of processors before Microsoft built a device.
wolfgke 7y ago
Intel produced SoCs for mobile devices, concretely Speatrum SC9853i and Spreadtrum SC9861G-IA. If you want to scale even further down, consider Intel Quark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark). For an analysis why it failed in the market, consider http://linuxgizmos.com/who-killed-the-quark/ http://linuxgizmos.com/who-killed-the-quark/ To me, it seems that the central reason why these chips failed commercially is that at the lower end, SoCs offer a much thinner margins than CPUs for laptops, desktop PCs and servers.
vbezhenar 7y ago
My friend uses Asus Zenfone which runs on Intel CPU. It works fine. Intel might have failed with economics or marketing, but engineering works.
saagarjha 7y ago
Interestingly enough, the baseband for iPhone XS runs x86.

cogman10 7y ago

I'd say the opposite is true. There isn't anything about Itanium that makes it worse for mobile. In fact, the opposite is true, it would be better for mobile because it was designed to push more of the optimizations into the compiler vs the hardware. That means less power required to do optimizations against running software. Because Itanium fits with mobile just as well as ARM does for much of the same reasons. After all, Itanium is essentially a RISC architecture. It never touched mobile because it was dead before mobile computing was really taking off. Heck, it was dead before ARM got a stranglehold on the market.

PeCaN 7y ago
> There isn't anything about Itanium that makes it worse for mobile. Shit code density?
burfog 7y ago
Mobile is expected to run JIT translated code. Itanium's design was finalized before JIT became important. Suddenly JIT was everywhere and spreading: Java, C# .net CLR stuff, Javascript, and more. JIT output can not be well-optimized because that takes too long. The code must compile while the end-user waits, so there is no time to do anything good. The code will be terrible. Itanium can't handle that.
acdha 7y ago
> There isn't anything about Itanium that makes it worse for mobile. In fact, the opposite is true, it would be better for mobile because it was designed to push more of the optimizations into the compiler vs the hardware. That means less power required to do optimizations against running software. There's a big problem with that: the VLIW layout is not as memory efficient so programs were larger and the instruction cache needed to be larger to compensate. Mobile architectures have traditionally had smaller caches and less memory bandwidth to save power. There is an interesting what-if question here: one of the big things which killed Itanium was the poor x86 compatibility meaning that while it was not entirely uncompetitive when running highly-optimized native code, it was massively slower for legacy apps even before you factored in the price. Compiler technology has improved by a huge degree since the 90s and in particular it's interesting to imagine would could happen in an Apple AppStore-style environment where developers ship LLVM bitcode which is recompiled for the target device, substantially avoiding the need to run legacy code.