As I recall, Itanium was Intel's attempt to bi-furcate the market and
keep 32bit for desktops and such, and to make their 64bit systems for
workstations and such a seperate product so they could take more
control of the motherboard, bios, etc.
Then AMD came out with the AMD64 64-bit extenstions to the Intel 386
(486?) instruction set, since they had an architectural license to the
ISA, so they just extended it and started shipping cheaper CPUs and
chipsets that could easily suport more than 4gb of RAM, without
requiring people to do major re-compiles of their software.
Especially since it would support 32bit applications in a 64bit OS
without *any* recompile needed.
They ate Intel's lunch. Which is why the Pentium 4 (I think) was such
a monster chip in terms of CPU GHz and heat, because they were trying
to catchup with the Opteron and other AMD chips.
John
Tim> My perspective was from working at Stratus. Continuum at the time was our flagship line of servers
Tim> that ran on PA-RISC and with Itanium it was clear the end of the line for PA-RISC was coming.
Tim> Bob Evans and others who were more intimately involved can probably explain it better, but I
Tim> remember Stratus getting a couple Itanium development workstations and my recollection 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 was
Tim> ported to Xeon and the rest is history. I'm sure someone somewhere is still happily 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 really that
Tim> invested in Itanium. What it did do was get HP out of the HPC market. It's fair to say that Xeon
Tim> based systems running Linux pretty much put the coffin nails in MIPS, PA-RISC and ultimately Sparc
Tim> and likely a few others I don't know about and with it the various operating systems that 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 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 spent the
Tim> past six months proving why even a regular CISC system was the wrong answer, and here Intel
Tim> was going in the opposite direction.
Tim> After twenty minutes of me fuming my boss simply grinned, shrugged his shoulders and left my
Tim> office.
Tim> While I was proud of the fact that the Alpha processor was so prominent in the production of
Tim> the movie "Titanic"......now I had to deal with a real life "Itanic"....watching it sink.
Tim> md
Tim> P.S. It was only a month or so after, I think, that AMD came out with a reasonable extension
Tim> to the i86 architecture....which (although it was not RISC) I was reasonably happy 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 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 as
Tim> "consumers".
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Tim> --
Tim> I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".
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