Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed With The Linux 6.7 Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed With The Linux 6.7 Kernel

Overnight the mainline Linux kernel has retired support for Intel Itanium (IA-64) processors...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IA-64-Removed-Linux-6.7

[tildearrow]

Intel: iAPX 432
AMD: High-performance x86

Intel: Itanium
AMD: 64-bit x86

Intel: Wells and Lakes with little to no IPC improvement
AMD: Zen

Every couple years, Intel falls asleep, and then AMD comes and wakes Intel up.

[s_j_newbury]

Biggest irony here: The architectures which were "killed" by Itanium, have outlived it in the Kernel.

[bezirg]

Can we now slowly do the same for x86(-64) and move to arm and/or riscv?

[pegasus]

Very slowly ... my crystal ball shows me optimistic x86 retirement date in 2050, realistic in early 2100

[Ironmask]

Fitting farewell music: https://youtu.be/e_hIMvZTc1A

I wonder if it weren't for AMD we would all still either be using 32-bit x86 clocked at 10Ghz or if we would have been forced into Itanium with massively buggy and incomplete compilers (because if you dont know, Itanium was impossible to program for, being essentially only good for signal processing and nothing else, and even Microsoft gave Intel the finger when MS was forced into supporting it through a contract). Because this was the ed-edd-n-eddy crap they were trying to pull with their architectures.
I'm *pretty* sure Intel isn't even a real company and has just been copying AMD's work for the last couple decades (AMD having literally invented the 64-bit extensions to x86 aside).

[skeevy420]

Intel: iAPX 432
AMD: High-performance x86

Intel: Itanium
AMD: 64-bit x86

Intel: Wells and Lakes with little to no IPC improvement
AMD: Zen

Every couple years, Intel falls asleep, and then AMD comes and wakes Intel up.

Intel: big.E-Core
AMD: big.X3D

Intel: More E-Cores and AI
AMD: 128 Real Cores

[Hibbelharry]

Can we now slowly do the same for x86(-64) and move to arm and/or riscv?

Why?

x86 doesn't perform badly. Keep in mind that current x86 is way different than 1978 x86, totally different beasts. I guess it's more a matter of when to drop some old legacy parts (early x86) from the architecture, killing compatibility with old software.

[skeevy420]

Can we now slowly do the same for x86(-64) and move to arm and/or riscv?

Maybe, but there'd have to be one hell of an x86-64 emulator, translator, whatever. There's nearly a half a centuries worth of software that'd be lost if that doesn't exist.

[dragon321]

It's pretty funny how AMD named their pro CPUs "EPYC" when Itanium design philosophy was named "EPIC". As for the Itanium it seems that Itanic is about to make final plunge.