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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.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12 2017, @05:57PM (2 children)
Entry level systems start at 14500 USD.
Seems expensive compared to an x86_64 box, but if you compare it to a power or sparc instead, it is right in line with the reason 2/3 of those processor architectures are dying off in the next few years (Fujitsu was the last remaining developer of SPARC and is migrating to ARM for their next supercomputer. Oracle already laid off their SPARC hardware staff, and every other company got shafted/bought out by the two back in the 90s with the sparc32 to 64 migration.)
It might be time to look into our own independent chip designs in the near future. I was just reading the Hackaday interview with Chip Gracey and his (Brother? Father?) from Parallax (makers of the propeller and stamp boards) in Rocklin, CA. The most interesting part of the interview was the bit about 250k being enough to get 180nm chip masks/production line spun up. Sure this is only ~ Pentium 3 era technology, but if enough people pulled together/crowd funded an SoC, or (if a million dollars or so could be pulled together plus the hardware engineers.) a complete motherboard chipset + cpu using tech from expired patents (notably PCI/SDRAM/etc up to 1997 if a full 20 year patent period was invoked?) We could work to free ourselves from the Wintel/Armdroid duopoly and begin providing the sort of free market solutions we had back in the late 80s to mid 90s before Intel managed to crush its competition through legalities while the 'big box' manufacturers killed themselves by pricing out of the market.
(Score: 1) by mechanicjay on Friday May 12 2017, @08:15PM
I think this is a pipedream. It's a pipedream that I am now thinking very very hard about.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday May 12 2017, @09:44PM
Good luck becoming a serious competitor to Intel with an architecture that can dodge their patent portfolio...