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Itanium: Mark Architecture as Orphaned
- formerly_proven 6y agoYes. Die, trash, die!
- Koshkin 6y agoThe king is dead, long live the king! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeraScale_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeraScale_(microarchitecture)
- jerrysievert 6y agoI remember my time at the OSDL when we got our first itanium servers in. I recall that even though we were "partnered" with Intel, it already felt like an orphaned architecture. once the mainstream press started calling it "itanic", it seemed even more doomed. I'm mostly sad to remember that the itanium was supposed to be a "replacement" for the DEC alpha, and Compaq selling the IP to Intel. very sad day for computing.
- spamizbad 6y agoIt's really a shame IA64 accelerated the deaths of Alpha and PA-RISC. Not sure they could have survived x86-64 or ARM64 but they still had legs when Itanium hit the scene.
- jerrysievert 6y agoI'm not entirely convinced that x86-64 would have come on the scene in its current form had itanium not been invested into so heavily by intel (and been such a failure). remember, intel seemed hesitant to extend the x86 architecture, and x86-64 came out of AMD.
- lizknope 6y agoLinux used to refer to the arch as amd64 and then Intel copied it a few years later. AMD licensed the EV6 bus from DEC and there was some discussion of having motherboards that could accept either an AMD K7 or DEC Alpha and just flash the BIOS. That might have made the Alpha last longer by having more low cost motherboards
- rstuart4133 6y agoIt's still referred to as amd64 in Debian.
- acomjean 6y agoI don't think anything could have survived the rise of X86. Most x86 chips were 32 bit at the time and you need Alpha/Sparc/PA-Risc, or some fancy custom chips to work in 64 bit. I wonder if the AMD/Intel competetion pushed x86 to get as fast as it got surpassing all those custom chips? HP was involved in Itanium and was discontinuing there own chip lines. We were talking about moving to it, for the "superdome" line of machines. I was working with PA-RISC at the time, and it seemed like this was the next chip. But it wasn't compatible with PA-RISC but had an x86 compatibility mode.. It was a weird chip, and required really good compilers. I thought it was long dead. It was interesting though.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518758
- rodgerd 6y agoMy impression was that HP essentially convinced Intel to build next-gen PA-RISC for them; for HP it was mostly a success in that it kept HP Unix and VMS running.
- mhh__ 6y agoARMs rise seems to be almost miraculous considering that I struggle to find any contemporary discussion of it as a serious ISA from back in the day.
- klelatti 6y agoBack in the day to be considered 'serious' Arm would have needed to compete on performance and that meant competing with Intel which they (primarily Robin Saxby) worked out was a losing strategy - so they didn't. Then getting AArch64 onto the same CPUs as AArch32 meant in one bound they could cast off the legacy and start to compete on performance.
- mhh__ 6y agoI was more thinking along the lines of academia than market share - if you read a book like the dragon book or Muchnick's text, they clearly thought we'd all be on Alpha or some other RISC machine rather than ARM - even for teaching.
- klelatti 6y agoUnderstood. I suspect that Arm was a bit too off the mainstream for teaching (why talk about Thumb / Jazelle etc?). Plus probably better to teach for an architecture that had the performance cachet and where you could get some desktop machines.
- mrpippy 6y agoMIPS as well. SGI announced the Itanium switch and dialed back MIPS investment in 1998, but Itanium wasn't really usable until Itanium 2 in ~2003.
- soco 6y agoWhenever I hear Itanium comes up the old pang of anger that it killed Alpha. Sorry can't help it.
- ithkuil 6y agoI wonder how would people feel about itanium failure had it been developed by anyone other than Intel; I mean, would there be that lingering feeling it could have been something had only the right amount of resources put into it etc etc?
- freeone3000 6y agoMaybe? The architecture is weird -- it required user programs to be aware of and utilize superscalar pipelining. Superscalar pipelining was a great bet, the assumption that programmers and application writers could explicitly take advantage of it was not. It's a really COOL architecture, but I'm not sure it could ever have been a commercially successful one.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- moonbug 6y agono. in order VLIW dependent on handwaving compiler magic never works.
- mhh__ 6y agoI still think there is a medium between the two that could work - if you look at uops per port measurements there's still a lot of room left for improvements i.e. the mantra is "The compiler will never know more than the chip" but sometimes the CPU is pretty dumb too
- CalChris 6y agoItanium was actually developed by HP starting in 1989 and then Intel joined in 1994.
- fred_is_fred 6y agoNot only that but in the early 2000s HP effectively gave Intel all their hardware design team to help with the effort.
- hyperman1 6y agoYou know an architecture is dead when even Linux gives up on it. Mixed feelings on this architecture. Oh well...
- SloopJon 6y ago> It's dead, Jim. I wonder how many folks would miss this reference. If I'm not mistaken, it's only in the original series. On the other hand, I guess Itanium is even more obscure than Star Trek at this point. I tend to assume that most people know at least as much as I do, so I was taken aback when, after explaining line endings to a co-worker, she asked, "What's DOS?"
- singingboyo 6y agoI think "he's dead, Jim" is/was common enough that many people would recognize it as a reference. Some would probably even know it as a Star Trek thing, but I suspect there are a bunch of people who know it references something but don't care enough to find out what. The line stands well enough on its own without context, so it can be used even without knowing what its referring to... but it clearly is a reference.
- codetrotter 6y ago> I suspect there are a bunch of people who know it references something but don't care enough to find out what. Yeah I’m in this boat. They say this on Reddit all the time so I know it’s a reference to something, but like you said I never bothered to check what it’s actually a reference to.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoStar Trek TOS is all spiffed up on Netflix, give it a try. Some of the episodes are still great.
- beervirus 6y ago>after explaining line endings to a co-worker, she asked, "What's DOS?" How old was she? I bet there are plenty of people born in the late 80s / early 90s who've never used DOS. Windows 95 changed everything.
- p1necone 6y ago
- barkingcat 6y agoThis architecture accelerated Intel's downward spiral. It should have been shut down years ago, and I find it surprising in the changelog that Intel "is still officially shipping chips until July 29, 2021" no wonder Intel is behind on innovation. They should have closed out the team working on this long long ago and changed everyone working on this to making their newer chips work better.
- ardy42 6y ago> This architecture accelerated Intel's downward spiral. It should have been shut down years ago, and I find it surprising in the changelog that Intel "is still officially shipping chips until July 29, 2021" no wonder Intel is behind on innovation. I don't think so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4: > Launched November 20, 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium: > Launched June 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core: > Launched January 2006 You seem to be basically claiming their downward spiral started before their biggest recent upswing, which doesn't make sense. Itanium (and the Pentium 4) were mistakes that they managed to recover from 15 years ago. However, it's only just being discontinued because Intel's not a company that's willing and eager to leave their existing customers in a lurch. Edit: it sounds like HP was basically paying Intel to keep Itanium alive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#HP_vs._Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#HP_vs._Oracle: > ...court documents unsealed by a Santa Clara County Court judge revealed that in 2008, Hewlett-Packard had paid Intel around $440 million to keep producing and updating Itanium microprocessors from 2009 to 2014. In 2010, the two companies signed another $250 million deal, which obliged Intel to continue making Itanium CPUs for HP's machines until 2017. According the the article, the latest Itatium processor was released in, surprise!, 2017.
- mprovost 6y agoWhen they say "still shipping" I imagine a box in a warehouse somewhere full of new old stock for enterprise customers with really long maintenance contracts. I'm sure nobody is actually working on the architecture anymore - I wonder when the last chip came off an assembly line.
- boulos 6y agoAhh the memories of dealing with Itanium for our large SGI boxes. It was super awesome to have a single system multi terabyte memory “machine” in 2005. It was not awesome to keep adjusting out code to be more amenable to the VLIW-like needs of the processor (Intel’s compiler actually generated very good messages as to “why we didn’t do a good job with your code”, you just often couldn’t do anything with that info). I still remain amused to guess what kinds of programs were included in the architecture simulations that led them to want so many integer units (12?) and so few floating point ones.
- moonbug 6y agoours mostly just ran x86 code..
- boulos 6y agoOn the funny Pentium3 equivalent thing bolted on? Or you mean in emulation mode?
- muth02446 6y agoAnd I thought Itanium was designed for Linpack ;-)
- aidenn0 6y ago> I still remain amused to guess what kinds of programs were included in the architecture simulations that led them to want so many integer units (12?) and so few floating point ones. If I had to guess, SPEC Int. I one had a frank conversation with a CPU designer at a chip company. I was looking at a CPU that was fairly wide superscalar, but had super tiny caches. I observed that this chip was probably only efficient at running Dhrystone. His response was "We win and lose 7 figure CPU sales based off of Dhrystone benchmarks. DMIPS/Watt is the only benchmark that matters for the majority of our sales in dollars"
- boulos 6y agoSure. Specint and the more modern specintrate are obvious choices for “we can’t suck at this”. But the overall architecture was so extremely over “int heavy” that the box was just not great for the supercomputing segment it claimed to want to play in. Maybe large Oracle databases, too? The architecture really was the only game in town for a while for having so many physical memory address bits. I just assume someone “resold” it to the HPC/supercomputing groups as “here, go sell this”.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoSame thing that happened to Transmeta ???. Too much dependence on software magic.
- wmf 6y agoTransmeta was reborn as Nvidia Denver... which is not that successful either.
- OldHand2018 6y ago> While intel is still officially shipping chips until July 29, 2021, it's unlikely that any such orders actually exist. We got two delivered a month or two ago. These ones are never going to run Linux, so it makes no difference if they drop support.
- secondcoming 6y agoWhat do you use them for, if you don't mind me asking?
- emidln 6y agoMost likely VMS
- zokier 6y agoI'd say HP-UX is at least as likely.
- OldHand2018 6y agoThey’ll be running OpenVMS. Funny - HPE sold that last batch of hardware, but they refused to sell software to go along with it - you have to go over to VSI to get that. It’s just an Ingres database and batch processing data into and out of it. Can you believe Ingres is still around?!? The replacement is a DataBricks/Spark system, but it’s years behind schedule - that’s why they had to buy new servers before production ended. It makes me sad that to match the performance of a 2nd-gen dual core Itanium (the entry-level processor back then - 10 years ago), we need a 10-node cluster and all the guys are hand tuning their partition parameters just to get to that performance level.
- icedchai 6y agoI still have nostalgia for OpenVMS. One of the first multi-user systems I worked on was a VAX! I bought an AlphaStation off of ebay a few years back and boot up VMS now and then.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoCan we un-orphan this by recreating this architecture using open source hardware? (A tall technological order, I know :) ) Would there be patent problems, or potentially copyright problems? Would there be a single person in the world who actually likes Itanium enough? Is there really no point at all?
- dsr_ 6y agoThe kind of people who want to work on vintage hardware usually want to work on vintage hardware that is either cheap or beloved or both. I think Itanium is neither.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoI think it also used 200 watts at idle. Put a bullet in its head.
- bitwize 6y agoHow about we not and devote resources to crowdsourcing open source Alpha-architecture chips. You know, the 64-bit powerhouse architecture Itanium killed with its weirdness and lameness. I know Jay Maynard (of Tron cosplay fame) runs an Itanic server in his house. Mainly because the ISA is so rare in the wild that it's unlikely to be affected by shotgun malware attacks.