>>>>> "Jon" == Jon \"maddog\" Hall <jon.maddog.hall@gmail.com> writes:
Yes, but I don't properly recall if the Itanium design was started
before AMD64 came or as a reaction to the AMD64. Haven't done any
research for the real timelines.
It's a shame the Alpha architecture didn't make it, even though it did
have some bad design decisions inside it's ISA and internal
architecture. It was still a pretty nice and clean 64-bit design. As
I recall, it's mostly the memory ordering around byte accesses that
are the problem.
Jon> Allow me translate what you said:
Jon> "As I recall, Itanium was Intel's attempt to bi-furcate the market and
Jon> keep 32bit for desktops and such, and to make their 64bit systems for
Jon> workstations and such a seperate product so they could take more
Jon> control of the motherboard, bios, etc"
Jon> to
Jon> "Itanium was Intel's abortive attempt to block AMD from making a
Jon> better, faster, cheaper 64-bit CISC product."
Jon> Shorter, and more to the point.
Jon> On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 4:13 PM John Stoffel <john@stoffel.org> wrote:
Jon> As I recall, Itanium was Intel's attempt to bi-furcate the market and
Jon> keep 32bit for desktops and such, and to make their 64bit systems for
Jon> workstations and such a seperate product so they could take more
Jon> control of the motherboard, bios, etc.
Jon> Then AMD came out with the AMD64 64-bit extenstions to the Intel 386
Jon> (486?) instruction set, since they had an architectural license to the
Jon> ISA, so they just extended it and started shipping cheaper CPUs and
Jon> chipsets that could easily suport more than 4gb of RAM, without
Jon> requiring people to do major re-compiles of their software.
Jon> Especially since it would support 32bit applications in a 64bit OS
Jon> without *any* recompile needed.
Jon> They ate Intel's lunch. Which is why the Pentium 4 (I think) was such
Jon> a monster chip in terms of CPU GHz and heat, because they were trying
Jon> to catchup with the Opteron and other AMD chips.
Jon> John
Tim> My perspective was from working at Stratus. Continuum at the time was our flagship line
Jon> of servers
Tim> that ran on PA-RISC and with Itanium it was clear the end of the line for PA-RISC was
Jon> coming.
Tim> Bob Evans and others who were more intimately involved can probably explain it better,
Jon> but I
Tim> remember Stratus getting a couple Itanium development workstations and my recollection
Jon> was that
Tim> the engineers weren't impressed.
Tim> It wasn't a fundamental improvement on PA-RISC as far as they could tell. Ultimately VOS
Jon> was
Tim> ported to Xeon and the rest is history. I'm sure someone somewhere is still happily
Jon> running
Tim> PA-RISC based Stratus servers, but I have to imagine that number dwindles each year.
Tim> Personally I have a hypothesis that Intel had really put it's bets on Xeon and wasn't
Jon> really that
Tim> invested in Itanium. What it did do was get HP out of the HPC market. It's fair to say
Jon> that Xeon
Tim> based systems running Linux pretty much put the coffin nails in MIPS, PA-RISC and
Jon> ultimately Sparc
Tim> and likely a few others I don't know about and with it the various operating systems that
Jon> didn't
Tim> get ported to Xeon.
Tim> On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 11:44 AM Jon "maddog" Hall <jon.maddog.hall@gmail.com> wrote:
Tim> I still vividly remember my boss showing me the plans for support of Intel's Itanium
Tim> processor.
Tim> As someone who taught operating systems and compiler design for a number of years I
Jon> still
Tim> remember my shock that THIS was the answer for Intel's 64-bit chip....an Ultra-Wide
Tim> Instruction set.
Tim> I wailed away about how all of this was WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.....mostly because I had
Jon> spent the
Tim> past six months proving why even a regular CISC system was the wrong answer, and here
Jon> Intel
Tim> was going in the opposite direction.
Tim> After twenty minutes of me fuming my boss simply grinned, shrugged his shoulders and
Jon> left my
Tim> office.
Tim> While I was proud of the fact that the Alpha processor was so prominent in the
Jon> production of
Tim> the movie "Titanic"......now I had to deal with a real life "Itanic"....watching it
Jon> sink.
Tim> md
Tim> P.S. It was only a month or so after, I think, that AMD came out with a reasonable
Jon> extension
Tim> to the i86 architecture....which (although it was not RISC) I was reasonably happy
Jon> with.
Tim> On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 7:24 AM Tim Keller via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Tim> Hey Everybody,
Tim> We've got a meeting next week on the 11th at our same time (7pm)
Tim> As for a topic, if somebody would like to present something, I'd be up for it.
Tim> I figure we'd all toast the depreciation of Itanium in the linux kernel. Good
Jon> riddance!
Tim> We'll definitely be talking about the PI4 Nano!!
Tim> As usual, I'm sure other topics will organically surface.
Tim> Location: Our usual Jitsu haunt: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA
Tim> Later,
Tim> Tim.
Tim> --
Tim> I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents
Jon> as
Tim> "consumers".
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Tim> --
Tim> I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as
Jon> "consumers".
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