[HN Gopher] Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6... ___________________________________________________________________ Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel Author : scrlk Score : 60 points Date : 2023-11-02 15:31 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com) | jamiek88 wrote: | It's funny thinking back to the hype cycle of Itanium back in the | heady days where performance was doubling every year, desktop was | king and this was the _future_. | | Turns out it was more like IBM's MCA / PS2 rather than the | future. | | Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always. | chx wrote: | 2009 summary | https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp | | > 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. | cubefox wrote: | This piece sounds like a lot of misrepresentation and | exaggeration. | chx wrote: | Whether the DEC Alpha development stopped because of Merced | (as it was called then) or because of the 1997 legal mess | https://www.wired.com/1997/10/intel-dec-settle-alpha-chip- | di... is quite hard to say. | | The DEC Alpha architecture was planned for 25 years and it | certainly was not technical barriers that killed the Alpha | 21464. | jabl wrote: | In the end it was market forces that did it in. Making | new chips was (still is!) exponentially more expensive | for each generation, and at the same time mass market | chips were getting better and better while they could | amortize the NRE costs over zillions of chips sold, | eating the market from below. And other RISC competitors | (and IA-64) were attacking from the sides. DEC just | didn't have the customer base or depth of pockets to fund | Alpha development. That it was Itanium that ultimately | delivered the coup de grace was but the final insult. | postmodest wrote: | As someone working in that space at that time, IA64 was still | losing to Sparc64 the entire time. We would do big boxes on | Solaris and replace older Sun boxes with ia32 Pentium Pros. | There wasn't really ever a point at which we thought "hm, RISC | isn't working for us, we need VLIW" ...and we were an HP | shop!!! | brookst wrote: | I still get confused whether the real name is _Itanium_ or | _Itanic_ | rasz wrote: | It was only the future until release date forced it to face the | reality. | | Linus Torvalds in 2003: | https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/x86.html | | >Itanium 2 doesn't hold a candle to a P4 on any real-world | benchmarks. | twoodfin wrote: | _Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always._ | | I'm not particularly confused about Intel's perspective on | compatibility: Even at the time, there were several examples of | successful platform CPU transitions across architectural "full | breaks". Apple going from 68k to PowerPC is the closest analogy | for Intel, and if the Itanium performance and software | (compiler) story had played out as Intel envisioned they likely | would have been fine. | | But as for ubiquity, I'm befuddled. As far as I've been able to | determine--having lived through it and followed many | retrospective threads like this looking for new evidence--Intel | had _no plans_ on any useful timeline to turn Itanium into a | (non-workstation) desktop or laptop chip. Did they really think | the market would stay bifurcated between "big iron" | architectures and x86 personal machines for another decade? I | can't imagine they would have believed that. | reidacdc wrote: | On the one hand, I am not surprised -- at my workplace, we only | ever had one Itanium system, an SGI Altix 3000-series computer. | It was kind of niche even when we bought it, and core-for-core, | the Itanium CPUs were slower than their competitors. What the SGI | was really good at was MPI parallelism. I don't know how much of | that was the CPU and how much was the overall system design of | the Altix, which featured a pretty amazing interconnection fabric | (CrayLink, I think?), and cache-coherency and a sophisticated | memory model. But not all problems parallelized well, so the | system ended up kind of being this weird outlier that was a good | answer to some classes of problems, but you had to remember it | existed. | | On the other hand, it's a bit of a shame to formally, officially | lose another option out of the computing ecosystem. | cy384 wrote: | numalink, 1.6GB/s in 2003! | | there's an altix 3000 on ebay that I'm kinda tempted by | https://www.ebay.com/itm/174917876903 | | it only runs like one specific version of suse or red hat | pixelesque wrote: | Previous discussion from a few days ago: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38115989 | jl6 wrote: | The latest 9700 models from 2017 are still in support until 2025! | linsomniac wrote: | I presume you mean "by Intel", because Linux has other ideas. | :-) | pram wrote: | The Itanium sales forecasts never fail to make me laugh. Aged | like the finest wine: | | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_... | tux3 wrote: | Contrast with the notorious IAE solar forecast: | https://zenmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/iea-vs-reality-... | | Statistics and modeling are complicated, granted. But when your | model diverges from reality 5 years in a row, perhaps you | should just extrapolate the current line next time around. | | (In the case of the Itanic, that would have been the line at 0. | Still a better forecast than what they did!) | duskwuff wrote: | > Contrast with the notorious IAE solar forecast | | "There's no way this level of growth can be sustainable." | | "Surely we've hit a stable level by now." | | "Maybe that last year was a fluke." | | Love to see it. :) | nullc wrote: | Easily one of the best illustrations on Wikipedia. | karmicthreat wrote: | I had a manager that loved these things. He would show horn eBay | one's into any gambling backend he did. It was terrible, | impossible to support and made accomplishing anything a chore. | Rust in peace. | dvaletin wrote: | Why it took so long? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-04 23:00 UTC)