5 ms·

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 befo

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.
  - Palomides 3y ago
    it's a piece of crap, but my 12 year old itanium box has 8 cores, sas controller, actual pcie ports, 10gb ethernet, and suppports up to 384GB of ram unlike raspberry pi 5 say what you will about power efficiency and better options existing, but simply looking at the hardware, these are still capable machines
    - justin66 3y ago
      So instead of being replaced by a an embedded SBC, they could be replaced by... an inexpensive modern PC?
      - Palomides 3y ago
        my inexpensive modern pc could also be replaced by a slightly newer inexpensive modern pc, so what? the point at which a machine becomes unusably obsolete is a judgement call, and I only consider itanium obsolete because every OS has basically given up on it, not because of the hardware
        justin66 3y ago
        That's fair. I've got some fully capable 32-bit x86 hardware that doesn't get the support which, it seems to me, it completely deserves. But like the enterprises that are almost fully transitioned away from Itanium, it's not like I'm actually willing to pay anyone to do the work.
        samus 3y ago
        It is exactly because of the hardware: Itaniums are pretty much unobtainable these days. This makes supporting software for these machines difficult and very expensive. This is the natural consequence of the manufacturer also having obsoleted it. Even quite outdated PC is trivial to obtain and support in comparison. Also for Amigas and C64s software maintenance is vastly easier since there are practical emulators.
- DebtDeflation 3y ago
  In 5 years it will be an 11+ year old CPU running on 7+ year old servers. These are enterprise database servers sitting in data centers not embedded machines sitting on a factory floor. The few still out there will be replaced over the next 2 years.
  - chasil 3y ago
    We are still running Oracle Rdb on a VAX. I wish that I could remove unsupported systems after two years. That must be a nice place. I have kept one Itanium server, just in case.
    - sillywalk 3y ago
      Interesting, like real hardware VAX, not something like Charon? What's it used for?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > In 5 years it will be an 11+ year old CPU running on 7+ year old servers. My desktop is 12 years old and works completely fine. The major difference being that it's x86_64 so it keeps getting current software.
    - chasil 3y ago
      You will not be able to run rhel9 on this platform, as it requires V2 or above. You can't run Windows 11 either. Under Linux, you can check with this script: #!/usr/bin/awk -f BEGIN { while (!/flags/) if (getline < "/proc/cpuinfo" != 1) exit 1 if(/lm/&&/cmov/&&/cx8/&&/fpu/&&/fxsr/&&/mmx/&&/syscall/&&/sse2/) l = 1 if(l==1 &&/cx16/&&/lahf/&&/popcnt/&&/sse4_1/&&/sse4_2/&&/ssse3/) l = 2 if(l==2 &&/avx/&&/avx2/&&/bmi1/&&/bmi2/&&/f16c/&&/fma/&&/abm/&&/movbe/&&/xsave/) l = 3 if(l==3 &&/avx512f/&&/avx512bw/&&/avx512cd/&&/avx512dq/&&/avx512vl/) l = 4 if(l > 0) { print "CPU supports x86-64-v" l; exit l + 1 } exit 1 }
      - 3y ago

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.
- Palomides 3y ago
  it's a piece of crap, but my 12 year old itanium box has 8 cores, sas controller, actual pcie ports, 10gb ethernet, and suppports up to 384GB of ram unlike raspberry pi 5 say what you will about power efficiency and better options existing, but simply looking at the hardware, these are still capable machines
  - justin66 3y ago
    So instead of being replaced by a an embedded SBC, they could be replaced by... an inexpensive modern PC?
    - Palomides 3y ago
      my inexpensive modern pc could also be replaced by a slightly newer inexpensive modern pc, so what? the point at which a machine becomes unusably obsolete is a judgement call, and I only consider itanium obsolete because every OS has basically given up on it, not because of the hardware
      - justin66 3y ago
        That's fair. I've got some fully capable 32-bit x86 hardware that doesn't get the support which, it seems to me, it completely deserves. But like the enterprises that are almost fully transitioned away from Itanium, it's not like I'm actually willing to pay anyone to do the work.
      - samus 3y ago
        It is exactly because of the hardware: Itaniums are pretty much unobtainable these days. This makes supporting software for these machines difficult and very expensive. This is the natural consequence of the manufacturer also having obsoleted it. Even quite outdated PC is trivial to obtain and support in comparison. Also for Amigas and C64s software maintenance is vastly easier since there are practical emulators.
DebtDeflation 3y ago
In 5 years it will be an 11+ year old CPU running on 7+ year old servers. These are enterprise database servers sitting in data centers not embedded machines sitting on a factory floor. The few still out there will be replaced over the next 2 years.
- chasil 3y ago
  We are still running Oracle Rdb on a VAX. I wish that I could remove unsupported systems after two years. That must be a nice place. I have kept one Itanium server, just in case.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    Interesting, like real hardware VAX, not something like Charon? What's it used for?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > In 5 years it will be an 11+ year old CPU running on 7+ year old servers. My desktop is 12 years old and works completely fine. The major difference being that it's x86_64 so it keeps getting current software.
  - chasil 3y ago
    You will not be able to run rhel9 on this platform, as it requires V2 or above. You can't run Windows 11 either. Under Linux, you can check with this script: #!/usr/bin/awk -f BEGIN { while (!/flags/) if (getline < "/proc/cpuinfo" != 1) exit 1 if(/lm/&&/cmov/&&/cx8/&&/fpu/&&/fxsr/&&/mmx/&&/syscall/&&/sse2/) l = 1 if(l==1 &&/cx16/&&/lahf/&&/popcnt/&&/sse4_1/&&/sse4_2/&&/ssse3/) l = 2 if(l==2 &&/avx/&&/avx2/&&/bmi1/&&/bmi2/&&/f16c/&&/fma/&&/abm/&&/movbe/&&/xsave/) l = 3 if(l==3 &&/avx512f/&&/avx512bw/&&/avx512cd/&&/avx512dq/&&/avx512vl/) l = 4 if(l > 0) { print "CPU supports x86-64-v" l; exit l + 1 } exit 1 }
    - 3y ago