Linux Looks To Retire Itanium/IA64 Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Looks To Retire Itanium/IA64 Support

It's been many years since Intel Itanium processors made a convincing story and faced a slow demise over the past decade. While the last of the Itanium 9700 "Kittson" processors shipped in 2021, just two years later now the Linux kernel is already looking at possibly seeing its IA-64 support removed over having no maintainers or apparent users...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Retire-Itanium-IA64-Patch

[coder]

Probably the worst legacy of IA64 is the lesson Intel seems to have taken to stay away from anything non-x86. I suspect that influenced their decision to base Larrabee on x86, rather than their iGPU ISA. Had they made a different choice, the past decade of GPU development might've looked very different.

The curse of IA64 might still haunt Intel. I predict they'll keep all their CPU eggs in the x86 basket for too long.

[coder]

I think the Itanium debacle also put people off some interesting ideas in IA64, such as hints that make instruction scheduling easier and more efficient.

[szymon_g]

i'm sure both of its users will be devastated

[schmidtbag]

At first I found this confusing - if Itanium was made as recently as 2021, that implies there must have been customers to justify its production in 2020, yet the article suggest there haven't been any. I know there's no modern Windows OS to support it. The BSDs have IA64 support but they seem to struggle just to be fully caught up with x86-64, so I don't see why anyone would run their enterprise on IA64 with BSD. So, I looked it up - apparently the OS is HP-UX, which is some other Unix derivative. I knew HP was really the only reason Itanium was still alive but I didn't think they made their own OS for it. I can't say I'm surprised though - I'm sure Intel didn't want anything to do with it and clearly, nobody from any other market cares, so it was really up to HP to do all the work.

Probably the worst legacy of IA64 is the lesson Intel seems to have taken to stay away from anything non-x86. I suspect that influenced their decision to base Larrabee on x86, rather than their iGPU ISA. Had they made a different choice, the past decade of GPU development might've looked very different.

It would also explain why Intel thought they could compete against ARM in the mobile market using x86. So the funny thing is, I'd say Intel has had more reasons not to put all their eggs in the x86 basket than to do so.

[Hibbelharry]

Bye bye Itanic.

[jabl]

At first I found this confusing - if Itanium was made as recently as 2021, that implies there must have been customers to justify its production in 2020, yet the article suggest there haven't been any.

AFAIU there was no big user of Linux on Itanium, except for SGI, but they switched over their Altix line to x86-64 before going economically in the drain and eventually ended being gobbled up by HPE.

So, I looked it up - apparently the OS is HP-UX, which is some other Unix derivative. I knew HP was really the only reason Itanium was still alive but I didn't think they made their own OS for it. I can't say I'm surprised though - I'm sure Intel didn't want anything to do with it and clearly, nobody from any other market cares, so it was really up to HP to do all the work.

HP-UX is an old-school unix. I think originally it ran on M68k(?) before switching over to HP's own RISC architecture, PA-RISC. The Itanium project originally started of as a HP research project to design a "PA-RISC 2.0", and then Intel got on board and eventually more or less took it over. That being said, I'm not sure there's any actual HP-UX development going on, or are they content on milking their existing customers as hard as possible before they jump ship to Linux for as long as it lasts.

Via the DEC (via Compaq, no?) acquisition HP also got hold of VAX/VMS, and they ported VMS over to Itanium as well. Similar to HP-UX, I guess they have a bunch of captive VMS customers that they are happily milking, with little resources spent on development. Not sure what the plan is for VMS, have they ported it to x86-64 or..

[rene]

I don't know what was recently broken, but the last time we release a https://t2sde.org ISO ia-64 was working ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNob4G2Zr8s

[Weasel]

Probably the worst legacy of IA64 is the lesson Intel seems to have taken to stay away from anything non-x86. I suspect that influenced their decision to base Larrabee on x86, rather than their iGPU ISA. Had they made a different choice, the past decade of GPU development might've looked very different.

The curse of IA64 might still haunt Intel. I predict they'll keep all their CPU eggs in the x86 basket for too long.

That's actually a good thing. Now I wish the same happened to ARM.

[Anux]

After the Titanic rammed the iceberg it sunk in less than 3 hours. This CPU-arch still has a little edge above water after 20 years.