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- Hacker News
- was there any advantage or special use case for running an itanium windows workstation instead of x86 back then?by t1234s
- More than 3GB of application memory space and more than 4GB overall (including the NT kernel).
At that time, this was starting to become a major issue at the high end of servers and workstations.
by twoodfin
I used to have this key memorized.XGCJ6-Q6XGJ-BQ2QQ-BRWJ7-67X7Wby WarOnPrivacy- Might need some background on this one.by corvad
- I miss itanium. I feel like a madman for saying it, but I do. Something about it is just alluring to me. Alas, the problems were too hard to solve or weren't worth solving anymore
Ironically, it died around the time LLMs/AI started becoming good. I feel like the compiler problems with vliw could be solved to a degree with a purpose built ai
by mghackerlady - > Ironically, it died around the time LLMs/AI started becoming good.
What?
I think maybe you are confusing Itanium with something else?
Development on itanium stopped in 2013:
> On 31 January 2013 Intel issued an update to their plans for Kittson: it would have the same LGA1248 socket and 32 nm process as Poulson, thus effectively halting any further development of Itanium processors.[1]
It's true that it shipped until 2021, but I think you had to already have previous orders to get that.
by nl - Even if the magical Itanium compiler did exist, Itanium would have still lost to AMD64. As soon as you introduce anything that doesn't behave in a statically predictable manner (multitasking, or virtualization, or even an application that processes unpredictable input like a web backend or database), your performance drops down to a fraction of what a similarly priced AMD64 chip could do. VLIW is great for some very specific workloads like HPC, but Intel should have never tried to replace x86 with it.by ndiddy
- Itanium was effectively dead once Intel adopted AMD's x86-64. It just remained a zombie for another 15+ years.by icedchai
- It was neat to live through the era where CPUs constantly got faster and they were willing to try such oddball stuff.
For such a long time it became “faster and more cores, don’t be different” and just didn’t seem as interesting.
Apple Silicon had been very interesting to me. I’m really hoping to see a stronger ARM push on Windows, both because I know it can be great and because it’s just interesting. Windows has never had to switch architectures (for consumers) or support two at once for any reasonable population.
Also, whatever happened to mill? We used to get posts about them all the time.
And I wonder what would have happened to Power if they had the 3rd party fabs that exist today instead of being stuck with what IBM could make in-house.
by MBCook - I think it died before that, it was just that buried it then.by spott
- People have tried all kinds of techniques for VLIW, including techniques that are much better than a purpose built AI, AI isn't a magic silver bullet. Fundamentally there's no reason you can't analyse a piece of code to death, and maximally extract parallelism out of it
The fundamental issue is that there simply doesn't exist enough information to be able to extract the necessary parallelism without a rewrite, its the same issue as trying to autovectorise. You can do it to some degree, but it doesn't work in practice to be able to fill out a very wide architecture with reasonable efficacy
The SIMT programming model has proven to be much more successful vs trying to autovectorise or mash things into a VLIW architecture
by 20k - So I feel like I need to write a blog post about this, but succinctly I think there's a good argument to be made that the issue wasn't the compiler despite popular wisdom. I don't even think it was the nature of unpredictable memory access times either as the itanium has a ton of special architectural hardware to handle unpredictable memory accesses (a lot of which are essentially some of the primitives that an OoO core uses for internal bookkeeping, just exposed architecturally).
I just think the arch has a similarity to archs like cell where it was planned for a world without the end of dennard scaling and just stopped making sense when we weren't targeting scaling to 10Ghz consumer CPUs and beyond.
The relatively fixed clock period that makes sense post ~2006 also means that the CPU architecture of that made the most sense ~2006 (Tomasulo OoO cores) continues to make sense, with most of the process gains going to just making bigger, wider cores.
by monocasa - I wonder if people are able to get Windows Server 2008 R2 to run on this yet as well. That was the last Windows OS to support Itanium, and it received updates until January 14, 2020.
EDIT: there was also an additional patch released in May 2020 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008_R2#Itanium
by tech234a - Wild that shipments of Itaniums didn't end until 2021.by qingcharles
- A historical note: Windows XP 64-bit Edition that was mentioned in the article, was Itanium-specific. It was based on XP kernel while Windows XP x64 Edition (for AMD64 architecture) was based on Windows Server 2003 kernel. Because of that, Windows XP x64 Edition had some significantly different performance characteristics compared to other Windows XP editions. If anything, it was closer to Vista than XP in some aspects.by sedatk
- Watching my mate explain to his father for the 100th time that the game wont run on his 64 bit Itanium workstation despite it running windows did eventually get old.by protocolture
- I ran Windows XP x64 Edition on a computer for a while and some software didn't like it. Since it was technically NT 5.2 (Server 2003) and not NT 5.1 (XP), some programs/installers would complain that it wasn't compatible. So, it was cool to have a 64-bit Windows XP, it was annoying to get stuff to run on it.by nticompass
- I would love to read the Microsoft PM spec for this product. Who in the world were they making it for?
Itanium never made it into the consumer-class hardware that was XP’s audience. AFAIK, Intel never even published a roadmap for that to happen!
Maybe a proof of concept they shipped as a demonstration of loyalty to Intel?!
by twoodfin