QEMU 2.11-RC1 Released: Drops IA64, Adds OpenRISC SMP & More

[phoronix]

Phoronix: QEMU 2.11-RC1 Released: Drops IA64, Adds OpenRISC SMP & More

QEMU 2.11-RC1 is available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=QEMU-2.11-RC1-Released

[s_j_newbury]

With IA64 dropped from QEMU I think that's a pretty conclusive nail in it's coffin. It's quite sad how IA64 died so young after being used as the justification of murdering competing projects like DEC's Alpha. Compiler tech is probably now about where the Itanium needed it to be to work effectively, and indeed the last iterations of IA64 did work well, although possibly not as well as a contemporary Alpha would have..? There is of course the rumour that CPUs used in the worlds current fastest supercomputer is derived by the Chinese reversing engineering the Alpha!

[thunderbird32]

Unsurprising they dropped IA64 as even Intel has basically admitted it's a dead-end platform. Weird to see them drop AIX though.

[AndyChow]

Unsurprising they dropped IA64 as even Intel has basically admitted it's a dead-end platform. Weird to see them drop AIX though.

They don't have the hardware to test it. You can read about it here. I know a few people that use AIX daily, and it's pretty much still rock solid.

[squash]

Pretty funny when someone drops your actively sold and developed cpu architecture that has been shipping for 16 years and replaces it with SMP support for a core that doesn't exist in silicon.

[torsionbar28]

With IA64 dropped from QEMU I think that's a pretty conclusive nail in it's coffin. It's quite sad how IA64 died so young after being used as the justification of murdering competing projects like DEC's Alpha. Compiler tech is probably now about where the Itanium needed it to be to work effectively, and indeed the last iterations of IA64 did work well, although possibly not as well as a contemporary Alpha would have..? There is of course the rumour that CPUs used in the worlds current fastest supercomputer is derived by the Chinese reversing engineering the Alpha!

Pretty sure QEMU is not even on the radar of IA64 vendors or customers, lol. The main problem with IA64, was that performance was abysmal during its first few years, and in that time, AMD invented the x86-64 Opteron. The market had a choice: a complicated new architecture that doesn't perform well - or 64 bit goodness and backwards compatibility for familiar old x86. That's a no brainer. No wonder in its 16 year history, IA64 never made it higher than 4th place in market share (behind x86-64, POWER, and SPARC). It was the answer to a question nobody asked. With 64 bit CPU's, intel fumbled, and AMD picked up the ball and ran with it.

HP is the only vendor still shipping IA64 servers since 2015. And the only OS they still support on it, HP-UX, is just as dead. The current version, 11.31, has been around for over a decade now with only minimal updates to it, and no plans for any new major version. Microsoft, Red Hat, and everyone else dropped support for IA64 many years ago, because nobody aside from HP is making IA64 based servers any longer.

IA64 and HP-UX, a marriage made in computing hell. Good riddance to both. Even intel has admitted IA64 is dead - look at the latest 2017 (final) version of it, code name Kittson. It offers literally no change whatsoever over the previous model. The highest clocked model gained 100 Mhz. Whoop-de-doo. No process shrink, still 32 nm. No new memory controller, still DDR3. No new instructions. No changes at all. It's a marketing rebranding exercise. The IA64 engineering staff has all been laid off or reassigned.

PS. I have active HP-UX Certified Systems Administrator certification, and worked for HP for many years.

[thunderbird32]

Pretty funny when someone drops your actively sold and developed cpu architecture that has been shipping for 16 years and replaces it with SMP support for a core that doesn't exist in silicon.

It is actively sold, but I wouldn't say IA64 is still actively developed. Intel has said (unless they've backtracked) the current Itanium is the final iteration.

[jacob]

With IA64 dropped from QEMU I think that's a pretty conclusive nail in it's coffin. It's quite sad how IA64 died so young after being used as the justification of murdering competing projects like DEC's Alpha. Compiler tech is probably now about where the Itanium needed it to be to work effectively, and indeed the last iterations of IA64 did work well, although possibly not as well as a contemporary Alpha would have..? There is of course the rumour that CPUs used in the worlds current fastest supercomputer is derived by the Chinese reversing engineering the Alpha!

There is no way compiler tech could ever be where Itanium needed it, because scheduling instructions for such an ISA im the general case is equivalent to thw Turing machine halting problem. It was a horrible idea from the start and frankly I'm amazed that someone manages to get HP and Intel to take it seriously at all.

Now don't get me wrong: an explicitly parallel core is GOOD(tm), but the parallel dispatch must occur dynamically, not at compile time. All modern CPUs do that and it's called hyperthreading. An instruction queue is continuously filled from two (or more) *INDEPENDENT* program threads and, after translation, these instructions are fed to a two-way (or more) internal EPIC/VLIW core. Because unlike the compiler, the internal dispatcher has a runtime view of the pipelines and current latencies, it can send individual instructions on the fly as needed. That's the right way to do it.

As for the Alpha, it is important to remember that there waa nothing magical about it. It was a stock RISC ISA, just like MIPS, SPARC etc. What made it so fast had nothing to do with its design, it came from the fact that the core was largely drawn by hand and hand-optimised to the last degree. That and a "dumb" (and thus quick) but large cache allowed it to reach 500MHz at a time when 100MHz was the norm.

[ruthan]

HP-UX is dead and AIX is next.

[timofonic]

I hope Intel solved iGVT-g support in qemu, using dma_buf or whatever.

And about Nvidia... Please don't be so ass as usual...

And about AMD: Please follow the Intel route but do it better and faster for the fist time...