5 ms·

Is there any point, even? In my understanding, Itanium never went anywhere other than rare enterprise use, and never been anything more than a minority, inconv

Is there any point, even? In my understanding, Itanium never went anywhere other than rare enterprise use, and never been anything more than a minority, inconvenient, uncompetitive architecture. At this point what servers remain will be slow, power hungry and unsupported. Even if the kernel did support Itanium, how many projects are even building for it anymore, let alone taking care of making sure it still works? Anything you can run on Itanium is almost certainly going to work better on AMD64. Unlike something like the Amiga, it never had an enthusiast fanbase, and unlike say, SPARC or SGI hardware I don't think it ever had any fancy weird enterprise features you couldn't get on AMD64. The only motherboards I can find are from Supermicro, and they support up to 16 GB RAM, and have a PCI-X slot (that's the server-type version of PCI, before PCI Express).

rob74 3y ago
That's the question I was asking myself too when I read quotes such as: > Frank Scheiner complained to the mailing list, saying that he and others had been working to resolve the problems with this architecture and had been rewarded by seeing it removed anyway That sounds a lot like "sunk costs fallacy" - "we invested a lot of work into this, so we want to go on with it". But it doesn't answer if there are enough actual users left to justify this work?
acomjean 3y ago
>Anything you can run on Itanium is almost certainly going to work better on AMD64. I worked on a project targeting hp superdomes (PA RISC). When that architecture was on its way out they started looking at amd64 as a replacement though Itaniun was the “successor” to hp risc and could run hpux (HP was involved somehow). It really never took off. The advance compilers that would give itanium software speed never really happened.
- u320 3y ago
  HP wasn't just involved, it was their baby from the beginning. But they realized that the investment was too large and risky and Intel needed a 64-bit arch. So they partnered up.
  - bpoyner 3y ago
    Yep, if you look at the Itanium Wikipedia article, it says 'Designed by: Intel, Hewlett-Packard'.
tetris11 3y ago
I have nothing useful to comment other than hope and whimsy. Hope: I loved the idea that the linux kernel not only freed new software from the shackles of corporate influence, but elevated old hardware and pushed them to reach their full potential using new CS concepts. Whimsy: I loved the idea that a time traveller from 2036 could take a modern linux kernel and run it on a 1976 IBM 5100, and debug various legacy program issues that existed in the future. The Linux kernel is the best weapon we can give to such a traveller.
- bluepizza 3y ago
  Such traveller can use a snapshot of a Linux distro from 2010. Just because it is out of mainline, it doesn't mean that the past disappeared. A major part of hardware preservation is software preservation. We can't expect Linux in 2023 to still support i386, but we have several Slackware ISO images that contain everything we need to operate this machine.
- creshal 3y ago
  Itanium never had much potential to begin with, and the amount of systems that ever made it out of corporate vaults can probably be counted on two hands. If those companies want to fix their decades of neglect, they can pay kernel maintainers for the upkeep.
rsaxvc 3y ago
I thought it was a marketing gimmick to get big iron competitors off homebrew risc solutions. Because Intel.
- acdha 3y ago
  When it started, there was concern that CISC x86 was hitting a performance wall and Intel really wanted something which was locked up so other companies like AMD, Cyrix, etc. couldn’t clone it. The part where it went wrong was a highly speculative bet on the academic argument that a simpler CPU with a smarter compiler was the future. HP and Intel bet the farm on that panning out, but they ran into a number of setbacks and the competition wasn’t giving them time to recover. Itanium was late and slower than predicted, and both RISC and x86 got a lot faster since they could focus on features like speculative execution and SIMD while Intel was pouring resources into fundamentals dealing with all of the perils of a new architecture, especially one which has significantly different performance trade offs. The original pitch was that Itanium would be faster, but most people found it to be significantly slower even on native code – compilers weren’t as good at finding instruction level parallelism as hoped – and once you factored in the cost it was irrecoverable: nobody is paying twice as much for a server which is half as fast on the hope that in years to come improved compilers might get closer to parity. The real winner was Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Linux: part of this switch involved a lot of RISC vendors giving up and switching to Windows. Companies like HP, SGI, etc. scrubbed their plans to focus on Itanium systems but they didn’t go back to their proprietary Unix variants.
DebtDeflation 3y ago
Intel released the final version of Itanium in February 2017. They stopped taking orders in January 2020. They stopped shipping chips in July 2021. Long before that, the only real remaining enterprise solution using Itanium was Oracle on HP. Oracle wanted out and tried to end development on the platform around 2011-2012 but HP sued them and won, forcing them to continue support. I believe Oracle finally EOL'ed the platform at the end of 2021 and HP intends to EOL it at the end of 2025. So short answer is no, there is no point, it's a dead end platform.
- hughw 3y ago
  In 5 years or so, after the current OSs those machines run go EOL, having an open source alternative OS to go to could become important for some uses.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    Which ones would those be, though? As far as I can tell, Itanium hardware is boring. It's PCI-X, DDR RAM, Ethernet, SCSI, USB. Stuff that's very common out there. And software mostly appears to be ports of software available on AMD64. If you do have some machine running custom built software to operate a factory or something then you wouldn't want to touch it. You'll just keep on replacing parts until it's time to redo it.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      In fact, in my memory the one innovation it did bring was UEFI... which was so good that other architectures picked it up as well.
  - mpol 3y ago
    Which uses would that be? The power/performance isn't right, rather quite wrong. You're better off buying a second hand x86-64 which draws less power and has more performance.
  - uxp8u61q 3y ago
    What uses? Even a raspberry pi 5 has better specs than all itaniums. Except maybe the last one, but obviously I don't have it at hand to test. And not many people do, considering that intel begrudgingly released it and didn't make an effort to sell it.

rob74 3y ago

That's the question I was asking myself too when I read quotes such as: > Frank Scheiner complained to the mailing list, saying that he and others had been working to resolve the problems with this architecture and had been rewarded by seeing it removed anyway That sounds a lot like "sunk costs fallacy" - "we invested a lot of work into this, so we want to go on with it". But it doesn't answer if there are enough actual users left to justify this work?

acomjean 3y ago

>Anything you can run on Itanium is almost certainly going to work better on AMD64. I worked on a project targeting hp superdomes (PA RISC). When that architecture was on its way out they started looking at amd64 as a replacement though Itaniun was the “successor” to hp risc and could run hpux (HP was involved somehow). It really never took off. The advance compilers that would give itanium software speed never really happened.

u320 3y ago
HP wasn't just involved, it was their baby from the beginning. But they realized that the investment was too large and risky and Intel needed a 64-bit arch. So they partnered up.
- bpoyner 3y ago
  Yep, if you look at the Itanium Wikipedia article, it says 'Designed by: Intel, Hewlett-Packard'.

tetris11 3y ago

I have nothing useful to comment other than hope and whimsy. Hope: I loved the idea that the linux kernel not only freed new software from the shackles of corporate influence, but elevated old hardware and pushed them to reach their full potential using new CS concepts. Whimsy: I loved the idea that a time traveller from 2036 could take a modern linux kernel and run it on a 1976 IBM 5100, and debug various legacy program issues that existed in the future. The Linux kernel is the best weapon we can give to such a traveller.

bluepizza 3y ago
Such traveller can use a snapshot of a Linux distro from 2010. Just because it is out of mainline, it doesn't mean that the past disappeared. A major part of hardware preservation is software preservation. We can't expect Linux in 2023 to still support i386, but we have several Slackware ISO images that contain everything we need to operate this machine.
creshal 3y ago
Itanium never had much potential to begin with, and the amount of systems that ever made it out of corporate vaults can probably be counted on two hands. If those companies want to fix their decades of neglect, they can pay kernel maintainers for the upkeep.

rsaxvc 3y ago

I thought it was a marketing gimmick to get big iron competitors off homebrew risc solutions. Because Intel.

acdha 3y ago
When it started, there was concern that CISC x86 was hitting a performance wall and Intel really wanted something which was locked up so other companies like AMD, Cyrix, etc. couldn’t clone it. The part where it went wrong was a highly speculative bet on the academic argument that a simpler CPU with a smarter compiler was the future. HP and Intel bet the farm on that panning out, but they ran into a number of setbacks and the competition wasn’t giving them time to recover. Itanium was late and slower than predicted, and both RISC and x86 got a lot faster since they could focus on features like speculative execution and SIMD while Intel was pouring resources into fundamentals dealing with all of the perils of a new architecture, especially one which has significantly different performance trade offs. The original pitch was that Itanium would be faster, but most people found it to be significantly slower even on native code – compilers weren’t as good at finding instruction level parallelism as hoped – and once you factored in the cost it was irrecoverable: nobody is paying twice as much for a server which is half as fast on the hope that in years to come improved compilers might get closer to parity. The real winner was Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Linux: part of this switch involved a lot of RISC vendors giving up and switching to Windows. Companies like HP, SGI, etc. scrubbed their plans to focus on Itanium systems but they didn’t go back to their proprietary Unix variants.

DebtDeflation 3y ago

Intel released the final version of Itanium in February 2017. They stopped taking orders in January 2020. They stopped shipping chips in July 2021. Long before that, the only real remaining enterprise solution using Itanium was Oracle on HP. Oracle wanted out and tried to end development on the platform around 2011-2012 but HP sued them and won, forcing them to continue support. I believe Oracle finally EOL'ed the platform at the end of 2021 and HP intends to EOL it at the end of 2025. So short answer is no, there is no point, it's a dead end platform.

hughw 3y ago
In 5 years or so, after the current OSs those machines run go EOL, having an open source alternative OS to go to could become important for some uses.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Which ones would those be, though? As far as I can tell, Itanium hardware is boring. It's PCI-X, DDR RAM, Ethernet, SCSI, USB. Stuff that's very common out there. And software mostly appears to be ports of software available on AMD64. If you do have some machine running custom built software to operate a factory or something then you wouldn't want to touch it. You'll just keep on replacing parts until it's time to redo it.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    In fact, in my memory the one innovation it did bring was UEFI... which was so good that other architectures picked it up as well.
- mpol 3y ago
  Which uses would that be? The power/performance isn't right, rather quite wrong. You're better off buying a second hand x86-64 which draws less power and has more performance.
- uxp8u61q 3y ago
  What uses? Even a raspberry pi 5 has better specs than all itaniums. Except maybe the last one, but obviously I don't have it at hand to test. And not many people do, considering that intel begrudgingly released it and didn't make an effort to sell it.