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posted by martyb on Friday May 12 2017, @11:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the tipping-of-the-iceberg dept.

Intel has released the final Itanium chips, the generation codenamed Kittson, with up to 8 cores on a 32nm process:

One of Intel's ventures into the historic mainframe space was Itanium: a 64-bit capable processor designed in conjunction with Hewlett Packard. The main reason for Itanium was to run HP-UX and compete against big names, such as Oracle, using a new IA-64 instruction set. The appeal for the original Itanium parts was support for RAS features, ECC, and cores focus on a wide, parallel architecture - the latest cores support 12-wide execution for example. For a short while, there was success: HP's systems based on Itanium are advertised as high-uptime mission critical servers, and a number of customers cling to these systems like a child clings to their favorite blanket due to the way they are integrated at the core of the company. The main purpose was to compete against other mission critical servers and mainframes based on SPARC and IBM Power.

So when the processors were initially delivered to customers, there was potential. However the initial impression was not great - they consumed too much power, were noisy, and needed over the top cooling. Over the years and generations of Itanium, the march into the x86 enterprise space with x86-64 drew potential Itanium customers away, then followed the drop of Microsoft's support for Itanium in 2008, and Oracle's dropped support in 2011. Xeon offerings were becoming popular, with CPUs incorporating the RAS/ECC features required, and Intel decided to slow down Itanium development as a result. In the meantime, due to the way the market was moving, HP transitioned a good part of its product stack to Xeons. Despite this, legal battles between HP and Oracle ensued given predicted support for HP-UX customers. At this point, there were fewer potential Itanium customers each quarter, although existing customers required support.

Today marks the release of the final known variant of Itanium, the 9700 series, beyond assurance testing. Intel spoke to IDG, stating that this generation, code-named Kittson, would be the final member of the Itanium family. These chips are likely to only end up in HP-based Integrity i6 high-uptime servers running HP-UX, and start at $14500. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has stated previously that it will keep support for Itanium-based products until 2025, with the latest OS update (HP-UX 11i v3 2017) coming in June.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Friday May 12 2017, @11:51AM (15 children)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Friday May 12 2017, @11:51AM (#508565)

    How does a chip get "noisy"? Do they mean the fans required to keep it cool were noisy?

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    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Nuke on Friday May 12 2017, @11:59AM (8 children)

    by Nuke (3162) on Friday May 12 2017, @11:59AM (#508568)
    Snotnose wrote :-

    How does a chip get "noisy"? Do they mean the fans required to keep it cool were noisy?

    No they can't have meant that because they mention "over the top cooling" as a separate criticism. The chips must have been noisy in themselves like an electronic Super-Brain in a 1950's Hollywood Sci-Fi B-movie sort of way. You know "Whheeaaooww .... Whheeaaooww ..." with the lights dimming up and down at the same time.

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by theluggage on Friday May 12 2017, @01:15PM (7 children)

      by theluggage (1797) on Friday May 12 2017, @01:15PM (#508598)

      You know "Whheeaaooww .... Whheeaaooww ..." with the lights dimming up and down at the same time.

      The problem is that the typewriter sound that all computers make when outputting text gets higher in pitch as the speed of the processor increases and, with the itanium, tended to upset local cats and dogs, shatter wineglasses etc. - although it could also cure your kidney stones. AMD-64's introduction of patented VT/ST ("virtual teletype supression technology") was one of the reasons it beat itanium.

      Also, intel's failure to deliver a working Jacob's Ladder [wikipedia.org] driver allowed PPC and ARM to get a head-start in serious scientific computing.

      However, the main thing that derailed itanium was the Intel's doomed anti-trust legal battle with chip giant Intel, claiming that Intel was abusing it's near-monopoly on the x86 processor architecture to prevent Intel from breaking into the market with it's non-x86 Itanium architecture - the resulting legal singularity eventually forcing them to adopt the rival Amd64 instruction set because their paradox neutralising machine needed working Jacob's Ladder drivers.

      Sorry - it must be Friday.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 12 2017, @10:12PM (5 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 12 2017, @10:12PM (#508879) Journal

        Also, intel's failure to deliver a working Jacob's Ladder driver allowed PPC and ARM to get a head-start in serious scientific computing.

        What is "Jacob's Ladder" here? Sounds pretty big, but Google isn't my friend today and I can't figure out what it's supposed to be.

        • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday May 13 2017, @04:15AM (4 children)

          by butthurt (6141) on Saturday May 13 2017, @04:15AM (#508995) Journal

          A Jacob's ladder (more formally, a high voltage traveling arc) is a device for producing a continuous train of large sparks that rise upwards. [...] often seen in films about mad scientists.

          -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob's_ladder_%28electricity%29#Visual_entertainment [wikipedia.org]

          • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Saturday May 13 2017, @11:52AM (3 children)

            by theluggage (1797) on Saturday May 13 2017, @11:52AM (#509098)

            ...which I did actually link to in the post, using one of those new-fangled hyperlink thingies where you click on the underlined text...

            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 13 2017, @12:02PM (1 child)

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 13 2017, @12:02PM (#509105) Journal
              Was it supposed to be a joke? Because I don't get the point of a Jacob's ladder arcing device to scientific computing.
              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 13 2017, @12:09PM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 13 2017, @12:09PM (#509107) Journal
                Ok, I think I have a reading comprehension fail here. I guess I was scanning the post and jumped to the paragraph with the link. I was reading about molecular simulation code [berkeley.edu] which uses the term, "Jacob's ladder" in referring to a certain process, and thinking, a) that can't be that big a demand, and b) how in the world do you make a CPU push that code faster?

                However, as the key ingredient in the KSDFT calculations, the exchange and correlation functional to determine the accuracy must be approximated. There are several choices of the so-called Jacob's ladder in the KSDFT calculations, including local density approximation (LDA), generalized gradient approximation (GGA) and hybrid functionals. However, the widely used semi-local LDA and GGA functionals fail to give accurate electronic structures in molecules and semiconductors due to lack of long-range nonlocal Hartree-Fock exchange interaction in the KSDFT calculations.

            • (Score: 1) by butthurt on Saturday May 13 2017, @12:47PM

              by butthurt (6141) on Saturday May 13 2017, @12:47PM (#509122) Journal

              Thanks, I see that now. I had looked at khallow's quote, from which your hyperlink had been elided.

      • (Score: 2) by driven on Wednesday May 17 2017, @07:35PM

        by driven (6295) on Wednesday May 17 2017, @07:35PM (#511324)

        Nice post. You should write for Cracked!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12 2017, @12:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12 2017, @12:43PM (#508584)

    I guess they are speaking about electrical noise.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Friday May 12 2017, @01:13PM (3 children)

    by RamiK (1813) on Friday May 12 2017, @01:13PM (#508597)

    Here's another one:

    there was success: [...] a number of customers cling to these systems like a child clings to their favorite blanket due to the way they are integrated at the core of the company.

    That's not a success. That's a handful of sales. A success is turning a profit or at least making a technical breakthrough and paving the way for others.

    So when the processors were initially delivered to customers, there was potential. However the initial impression was not great - they consumed too much power, were noisy, and needed over the top cooling.

    No. Itanium failed over the (lack of) compiler optimizations.

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    compiling...
    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday May 13 2017, @04:21AM (2 children)

      by butthurt (6141) on Saturday May 13 2017, @04:21AM (#508998) Journal

      > A success is turning a profit or at least making a technical breakthrough and paving the way for others.

      Maybe one out of three?

      Outside embedded processing markets, Intel's Itanium IA-64 explicitly parallel instruction computing (EPIC) and Elbrus 2000 appear as the only examples of a widely used VLIW CPU architectures.

      [...]

      In December 2015, the first shipment of PCs based on VLIW CPU Elbrus-4s was made in Russia.

      -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_2000 [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday May 13 2017, @10:18AM (1 child)

        by RamiK (1813) on Saturday May 13 2017, @10:18AM (#509073)

        I should have specified "...and paving the way for others to succeed". Maybe add "purposefully" and "causal relations" too... After all, one neither credits the apple tree for the discovery Laws of Motion nor Lamarck for Evolution.

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        compiling...
        • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday May 13 2017, @01:15PM

          by butthurt (6141) on Saturday May 13 2017, @01:15PM (#509130) Journal

          > I should have specified "...and paving the way for others to succeed"

          I meant to link to Wikipedia's VLIW article; copy-pasting the one about the Elbrus 2000 was a mistake. I wasn't trying to imply that the Itanium led to the Elbrus.

          Isn't Itanium the only exemplar of an EPIC architecture? The fact that it exists and functions could be considered an accomplishment--although I did see the other commenter's remark that the distinction between VLIW and EPIC was a matter of marketing some "tweaks."

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12 2017, @02:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12 2017, @02:28PM (#508623)

    > How does a chip get "noisy"? Do they mean the fans required to keep it cool were noisy?

    What do you expect? Its anandtech. A site by and for 'enthusiasts.'
    If it doesn't run call of duty and can't be pimped out with LEDs they don't know how it works.