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Intel Itanium's Last Breath

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

takyon writes:

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: 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.