John,

My perspective was from working at Stratus. Continuum at the time was our flagship line of servers that ran on PA-RISC and with Itanium it was clear the end of the line for PA-RISC was coming.

Bob Evans and others who were more intimately involved can probably explain it better, but I remember Stratus getting a couple Itanium development workstations and my recollection was that the engineers weren't impressed.

It wasn't a fundamental improvement on PA-RISC as far as they could tell. Ultimately VOS was ported to Xeon and the rest is history. I'm sure someone somewhere is still happily running PA-RISC based Stratus servers, but I have to imagine that number dwindles each year.

Personally I have a hypothesis that Intel had really put it's bets on Xeon and wasn't really that invested in Itanium. What it did do was get HP out of the HPC market. It's fair to say that Xeon based systems running Linux pretty much put the coffin nails in MIPS, PA-RISC and ultimately Sparc and likely a few others I don't know about and with it the various operating systems that didn't get ported to Xeon.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 11:44 AM Jon "maddog" Hall <jon.maddog.hall@gmail.com> wrote:

I still vividly remember my boss showing me the plans for support of Intel's Itanium processor.

As someone who taught operating systems and compiler design for a number of years I still remember my shock that THIS was the answer for Intel's 64-bit chip....an Ultra-Wide Instruction set.

I wailed away about how all of this was WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.....mostly because I had spent the past six months proving why even a regular CISC system was the wrong answer, and here Intel was going in the opposite direction.

After twenty minutes of me fuming my boss simply grinned, shrugged his shoulders and left my office.

While I was proud of the fact that the Alpha processor was so prominent in the production of the movie "Titanic"......now I had to deal with a real life "Itanic"....watching it sink.

md

P.S. It was only a month or so after, I think, that AMD came out with a reasonable extension to the i86 architecture....which (although it was not RISC) I was reasonably happy with.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 7:24 AM Tim Keller via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Hey Everybody,

We've got a meeting next week on the 11th at our same time (7pm)

As for a topic, if somebody would like to present something, I'd be up for it.
I figure we'd all toast the depreciation of Itanium in the linux kernel. Good riddance!

We'll definitely be talking about the PI4 Nano!!

As usual, I'm sure other topics will organically surface.

Location: Our usual Jitsu haunt: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA

Later,
Tim.
--
I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".
_______________________________________________
WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org
To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org
Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/
Change Settings: https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/
Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/BJNCCXFBJF6XUN6SX6D4WTW4NNCY4JKQ/