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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, Insightful) by aim on Friday May 12 2017, @02:07PM (3 children)

    by aim (6322) on Friday May 12 2017, @02:07PM (#508611)

    I recall that we (organizers of a Linux conference) got ahold of a demo server, back in the early days of Itanium. It came already preloaded with a Linux distribution, can't remember which one (maybe RedHat?). But man, was that box slow. We had experience with all sorts of hardware, including x86, PA/RISC, Alpha, SPARC, SPARC64, which all pretty much blew Itanium out of the water. The architecture was pretty much a non-starter for us, we never went with it, even after the platform had some time getting optimized.

    I still keep wishing HP had stayed on the Alpha path instead of betting (and mostly losing) on Itanium. I guess AMD - helped by ex-Alpha people - made the right choice upgrading x86 to x64, which has become the standard (besides ARM in the mobile space).

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday May 12 2017, @02:25PM (2 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday May 12 2017, @02:25PM (#508622) Journal
    If it was an early Linux distro, it was almost certainly compiled with GCC. At the time, GCC had basically no decent VLIW support and was atrociously bad at generating Itanium code - bundles were almost always padded with a lot of NOPs and so you ended up using a lot of i-cache and not using many execution pipelines. Code compiled with ICC ran a factor of 2-10 faster, and got progressively faster until they fired the entire Itanium compiler team a few years ago. One of the problems with Itanium was that it required a very clever compiler and Intel shipped it before they had one.
    --
    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12 2017, @02:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12 2017, @02:36PM (#508627)

      Hell, it might have even been x86 code running on the 'emulator' / co-processor part of the chip. That was dog slow.

    • (Score: 2) by turgid on Friday May 12 2017, @05:51PM

      by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 12 2017, @05:51PM (#508754) Journal

      I seem to remember reading somewhere rants by Linus implying that any compiler for itanic would have to be very clever indeed, in that it would have to be able predict the future. The decision not to put certain things into the hardware meant that itanic wasn't much use for anything other than tight Fortran loops.