
Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums - ch_123
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13924/intel-to-discontinue-itanium-9700-kittson-processor-the-last-itaniums
======
q3k
Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane,
impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel
overengineering. Good riddance.

On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium
is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started.

Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring,
safe designs possible: IA32/amd64. ARM was kinda quirky (conditional
execution, barrel shifter), but those were slowly neutered (by introducing
Thumb), and then totally thrown out of the window with aarch64. SPARC is dead.
PA-RISC is dead. RISC-V is new and promising, but is also the most pragmatic
and safe design of an ISA ever. The Mill CPU is interesting, but is
underfunded and I don't think it will ever be taped out.

Similar as with OS research (think: Solaris, Plan9/Inferno), researchy and
experimental CPU ISAs seem to be a thing of the past now.

~~~
pcwalton
x86-64 is anything but "boring" and "safe". :)

Real mode, Mod R/M and SIB byte encoding weirdness, REX prefixes, 80-bit
floats, parity flag, hard-wired registers for shifts/multiplies/divisions,
builtin CRC32 over the wrong polynomial, Pascal calling convention support,
binary-coded decimal, high halves of 16-bit registers, MMX overlap with x87
floating point, etc. etc.

~~~
q3k
Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal
with in the name of backwards compatibility.

~~~
Klathmon
>most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy

This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times
before, and I don't know what it means.

Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that
people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange
markup syntax for something?

~~~
q3k
Emacs/readline bindings for Delete Word. Open up a bash shell, type in `foo
bar baz`, then press ctrl-W twice.

'^W' is what would appear instead if you weren't in a readline/emacs editor,
but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving '^W' behind makes it look like
you didn't realize what you just corrected is still visible.

It's a joke. I've now explained and ruined it.

~~~
bluedino
Slashdot posters would use ^H^H in their posts (backspace)

~~~
lscotte
It goes back way further than that - probably to the dawn of IRC or so.

~~~
pjscott
I believe it dates back to the unix talk(1) program, quite a bit earlier than
IRC.

~~~
TheCondor
It’s from the dec terminal emulation, VT100. I think specifically when you
connected to like an ansi type system with dec mode. Or something like that,
the memories are fuzzy

------
chx
From almost exactly ten years ago: How the Itanium Killed the Computer
Industry

[https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp](https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp)

> The MIPS chip, the DEC Alpha (perhaps the fastest chip of its era), and
> anything else in the pipeline were all cancelled or deemphasized. Why?
> Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money
> on good ideas that didn't include it?

> The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor
> sealed the fate of Intel—and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to
> 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next
> level.

> It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that
> the next level was below us, not above. The next level was the basement, in
> fact. Hopefully Intel won't come up with any more bright ideas like the
> Itanium. We can't afford to excavate another level down.

~~~
ghaff
I'm not sure what point Dvorak is even making in that article. Yeah, a lot of
ultimately wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64 plus a
somewhat diminished set of CPUs from some of the big Unix vendors. It's an
interesting question but I'm ultimately not sure that the computer industry
would look all that different today had Intel just done 64-bit extensions to
x86 or something similarly evolutionary.

AMD might well not exist. But, except for HP, the big Unix vendors mostly
hedged their bets anyway. The large Japanese companies who also backed Itanium
never were going to make the investments to break out beyond Japan.

~~~
codinger
X86-64/AMD64 was solely developed by AMD and licensed to Intel.

I'm stating this because I can't tell what you mean by:

"wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64"

~~~
ghaff
Intel was independently developing 64-bit extensions under the code name
Yamhill. I know there some legal settlements around the time so they may have
cross-licensed technology. AMD came out first but Intel had much the same
thing in its back pocket.

What I last statement meant was we ended up by an industry dominated by 64-bit
x86 anyway in spite of all the effort that went into an alternative 64-bit
architecture. So we’d probably be in a similar place had Intel just decided
Itanium was a bad idea from the start.

~~~
chx
What ...? Yamhill was an _answer_ to AMD64. The first rumors appeared in 2002
where AMD announced AMD64 in 1999, released the full specs in 2000 and
actually shipped the first Opteron CPU in 2003 April, Intel shipped the Nocona
in June 2004. This trailing remained for a while -- LAHF/SAHF in 64 bit was
shipped in March 2005 by AMD but only December 2005 by Intel.

~~~
ghaff
Well sure. Intel much preferred Itanium to succeed. Absent AMD, it’s possuble
Itanium would have muddled through in the end. (Or something completely
different would have played out.)

it’s safe to say that Intel has some sort of contingency plan going back quite
a while. Some analysts even thought they saw features in Pentium that
suggested 64-bit readiness.

But it wasn’t until Opteron’s success and its adoption by esp. HP and Dell
that Intel felt they needed to make their 64 bit extensions plan public.

~~~
FullyFunctional
You are correct. What people don't seem to appreciate are the internal
conflicts within large organizations. There were in fact massive internal
conflicts at Intel between the Itanic and the legacy. Companies that large
doesn't "think with a single brain".

Random aside: Itanic was HP's brainchild that was adopted and refined at Intel
(and far from all of Intel was excited about that). Having experienced a VLIW
that _didn't_ suck (the internal engine of Transmeta's Astro 2/Efficieon) I'm
sad that EPIC/Itanic gives VLIW as bad name. However, the future belongs to
RISC-V.

------
johnklos
They shouldn't have killed an excellent processor (the Alpha) which already
had tons of software and history and was already being used in the fastest
supercomputers in the world for a product that was never (and still isn't)
proven. The Itanic was never best in its class at anything.

~~~
skynetv2
agreed, Itanium investment should have gone to the Alpha.

Itanium was really good at raw performance as long as you could write hand
tuned math kernels or kept working with the compiler team to optimize code for
your kernel. Took me a while, but I got 97% efficiency with single core DGEMM.

~~~
shereadsthenews
Hand-written code for Itanium was always smoking fast. One-clock microkernel
message passes and other insanity. But nobody ever figured out how to write a
compiler that could generate code like that for that machine.

~~~
zamalek
> nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code
> like that for that machine

Were a lot of people trying? It was a pretty difficult platform to get hold of
and tinker with.

~~~
shereadsthenews
I’m not sure how many people, but it’s all the compiler group at HP did for
the last twenty years.

~~~
Something1234
HP has a compiler group. I wasn't aware there were all that many commercial
compilers still around, and I definitely wouldn't have thought of HP.

~~~
ghaff
Who else do you think would have developed the compilers for HP-UX, VMS, and
NonStop?

~~~
Something1234
Present tense. The GP comment was in present tense, not a long time ago.

------
leetrout
The end of an era and one of the worst technology bets / choices. Every time I
hear Itanium I think of SGI going under.

~~~
tyingq
The original RISC/Unix players were most of my career. Pyramid MIPS/OSX, then
Sparc/SunOS, AIX, PA-RISC/HPUX, Dec Ultrix followed by Alpha, etc. I remember
trying to tell my co-workers that Linux would wipe it all out, shortly after
AMD rolled out Opteron. Most of them chuckled.

~~~
Theodores
I chuckled. Which was silly as I missed the boat with Linux until Ubuntu came
along. The versions of Linux I first saw were mere toys compared to the SGI
awesomeness I knew at the time.

~~~
tyingq
Oh, yeah. I did not see it with early Linux, and like you, thought it was a
fun toy. It was specifically the 64 bit x86 thing that caught my attention.
The memory ceiling for 32 bit x86 made it easy to ignore Linux. If I remember
right, Linux was also still crashing pretty regularly under load just before
that time frame too.

~~~
burfog
Before that time frame, PC hardware vendors had little incentive to make
stable hardware. It was easy to blame crashes on Windows. If the hardware
itself made a few crashes per week, that wasn't going to be enough to be
noticed.

The early 64-bit PC hardware was server grade, intended for NT and Linux. That
set a standard, and then gradually people moved away from junk like Windows
98SE and Windows ME. Hardware bugs no longer had such an easy time hiding in a
flood of software crashes.

------
tyingq
So HPUX finally dies. Doesn't leave much of the original commercial RISC/Unix
players still on some level of life support. I guess there's still AIX/Power.

~~~
protomyth
Last I looked, they were porting HP/UX over to x86. The port came up in the
whole HP vs Oracle lawsuit.

~~~
ch_123
There was talk of this, but it went away. The last suggestion I’ve read about
were some kind of ‘containers’ which emulate HP-UX

[https://www.pcworld.com/article/3196353/data-center/hpe-
offe...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3196353/data-center/hpe-offers-an-
escape-from-the-aging-hp-ux-os-via-containers.html)

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_projec...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project_kinetic/)

~~~
greglindahl
Novell Netware lived on for a long time running as a VM. Doing that makes it
much easier to support new hardware.

~~~
Twirrim
I didn't realise Netware had finally been discontinued. That's the server OS I
originally cut my teeth on, dealing with IPX/SPX based networks.

~~~
pjmlp
Me too. :)

We used it for a Clipper based management application.

My first task was bringing back to life our school labs network, so that we
could use it for that application, got to love those coaxial cable
terminators.

~~~
Twirrim
> got to love those coaxial cable terminators.

Man. So many memories of walking around the school with a cable tester trying
to find where the ring had been broken _this_ time.

I was so glad to see that ring network be retired.

~~~
protomyth
We are buying a new iSeries and the IBM person was very specific that the
terminal we have in the server room is NOT supported anymore without some
weird interface board. I was kind of sad at the thought. Even sadder knowing
I'm going have to load IBM's client access software on some poor PC.

~~~
Twirrim
SNA? It's super fantastic fun. Honest.

I worked for an egovernment company several years ago. A state (county?)
agency built a service with us, and wouldn't expose the actual database to us,
just an SNA supporting interface. We were essentially scraping the data.
Messy, unsanitised data. I really didn't envy the developer who looked after
that particular application.

~~~
protomyth
I'm pretty sure what we are getting is a renamed Client Access on a small PC
we need to set in the server room. Client Access is legendary for how bad it
is from installing to using. I would rather have the terminal.

------
gumby
I wonder what it’s like working on Itanium over the last decade (and perhaps
earlier). I can see someone joining early on when the marketing buzz was
exciting and reality had not set in.

But now...you’re working on a product that is widely mocked and has no future,
yet releases are still being made. How depressing...what causes someone to
stay on?

~~~
ghaff
A lot of people have good jobs supporting and incrementally enhancing legacy
products and product lines of various kinds in software, computer hardware,
and in many other areas. It’s mostly a Silicon Valley concept that if you’re
not working on something ground-breaking you’re wasting your life. And how
many people at some of those big SV companies are mostly just working on ad
tech?

~~~
gumby
True, my point is that itanium itself was a laughingstock, and clearly with no
future, so must have been embarrassing to talk to your friends about what you
do for work.

Making spare parts for the B-52, or maintaining security fixes for Solaris
(which has its fanatic fans) can be rewarding, no question. But to work on the
Itanium any time in the last decade must have been soul-sucking.

~~~
achiang
I was an HP-UX kernel engineer from 2002 til 2005, a brief interlude writing
IA64 CPU diagnostics, and then and a Linux kernel engineer from 2007 til 2010,
all on Itanium systems.

In that time frame, it wasn't clear that horizontal scale out architecture
(aka "the cloud") was going to dominate, and that scale up systems were going
the way of the mainframe. The thinking was that there would always be a
healthy balance of scale out vs scale up, and btw, HP alone did $30B+ revenue
yearly on scale up with very slow decline, just like the mainframe market,
which is still $10B+, even today.

To put that in today's terms, if you pitched a startup with a $30B TAM, VCs
will definitely be returning your emails.

So no, it wasn't embarrassing to talk about working on IPF any moreso than it
would be to talk about POWER today. It's just another CPU architecture with
some interesting properties but ultimately failed in the market place. Just
like Transmeta or Lisp Machines.

What _should_ be embarrassing, but clearly is not, is to slag off entire
industries not knowing shit about them.

Edit: I think working on B-52 parts would be an amazingly fun job.

~~~
gumby
thanks.

------
ithkuil
OpenVMS port to x86-64 still work in progress:
[http://www.openvms.org/node/111](http://www.openvms.org/node/111)

~~~
rocky1138
I was surprised to see this so far down the comments chain. What will OpenVMS
do without Itanium?

~~~
ghaff
As the parent indicates they're porting it to x86-64. I've been away from
following HP proprietary systems for almost 10 years but they put a plan in
place quite a while ago when it became obvious that Itanium had no future.
Remember that systems in this space don't need to be the latest and greatest.
They need a long support roadmap but it's mostly fine if hardware is on the
older side.

------
pinewurst
Back in 2012, Oracle published some interesting (and IMHO amusing) internal HP
documents re Intel and ongoing Itanium development.

[http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/itanium-346707.h...](http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/itanium-346707.html)

------
ttul
I got to work with one of the first Itanium machines back in 2000 working as
an intern. My job was to port Perl to IA-64. It was an amazingly fast machine
- like living a few years into the future.

I can see why it failed to gain mass traction, but that’s a shame. IA-64 was
so innovative.

~~~
macintux
HP paid my employer (Progeny) to help port Debian packages to an early Itanium
system. I don’t remember thinking it was fast _at all_ , but maybe my memory
is colored by later miseries.

------
arnon
It's interesting that it was actually AMD that kept the Intel x86-64
architecture alive.

Intel knew that the x86 architecture was limited in time, and tried to kill it
off with the the 64-bit Itanium.

AMD had a different plan, and released 64-bit capable x86 processors,
obstructing Intel’s plans to dominate with Itanium. I think this is key to why
Itanium never caught on, and why writing software for it is so hard.

------
kijiki
Itanic inspired what is unquestionably the best graph-based trolling of
bullshit marketing ever:
[https://regmedia.co.uk/2004/09/19/itanium_sales_small.jpg](https://regmedia.co.uk/2004/09/19/itanium_sales_small.jpg)

Wikipedia has an updated version as well:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_edit.png)

------
InclinedPlane
Itanium represents a classic case of jumping architectures and committing too
soon. Any mature system represents not just the sum of a huge amount of design
work but also an untold number of hours (years really) of beta testing, bug
fixing, and iterative refinement. A new system may be built on a better
foundation but more often than not in its immature state it will still have
shortcomings until it's been through a long period of "burn-in" and bug
fixing.

------
ddtaylor
It's x86 all the way down.

------
baybal2
People have to admit that "Itanic" was a just name for it.

------
tapland
Well, guess we'll hope for that X86 OpenVMS to be released soon then.

------
paulie_a
Honestly I thought they ditched the itanic a decade ago.

------
robk
Goodbye Itanic

------
hestefisk
R.I.P. Itanic.

