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Intel Dumps Iitanium's x86 Hardware Compatibility
Spinlock_1977 writes "C|Net is running a story that Intel is going back to software x86 emulation on Itanium in order to reclaim chip real estate. (room for another 9MB of cache?)
One notable quote about x86 emulation: 'Basically, no one ever used hardware-based IA-32 execution, so better to use the silicon for something else,' said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. 'Of course, basically no one uses software-based emulation either, but at least that doesn't cost chip real estate.'"
Intel's chips will use that extra sillicon for a nice pair of fake breasts. That's sure to up their earnings next quarter. Take that AMD.
I think the days of it mattering what the exact instruction set is are pretty much over.
Sheesh, the Itanic wasn't exactly a success story. How does it fit into their new roadmap with cooler chips that eat less power? That processor was a goddamn space heater.
Amd implements it.
I know what to invest in....
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
This is very old news. Various sources and die photos have showed this for more than a year... ...and no one cares.
The die space reclaimed was somewhat significant, and the software emulation is faster than the hardware emulation.
-- Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?
"Of course, basically no one uses Itanium either..."
if they are going to dump x86 compatibility, why not dump Itanium compatibility and just go back to Alpha?
Why not extend that logic? No one really used the Itanium chip anyway so why not use the silicon to make Yohan's for Apple?
Help fight continental drift.
Sheesh. It took them what, 15 years to realize that they needed to DUMP backward compatibility to become efficient? *cough* 640K barrier *cough*
What strikes me is that only when they begin losing market share to AMD, they begin to search for design flaws (obviously they don't have time to waste in x86 emulation when they're falling behind)
Might as well dump x86 from the core. They are right, who would buy an Itanium to run x86 code? Of course, who would buy an Itanium for just about any thing? Very few people want to code for EPIC, I think the industry has pretty much prooven that point by following AMD's lead with x86-64. But for those who do use Itanium it makes more sense to pump up that on die cache!!
Seriously. Is there any reason to buy one of the things? What does it do that justifies ANYONE buying one? Does it still have the "best" floating-point performance?
Why not just say....
Basically, no one ever used Itanium , so better to use the silicon in a more meaningful manner...
1. Stop making Itanium chips
2. Harvest saved silicon
3. ????
4. Profit!
Given ???? involves *cough* implants of some type....
Imagine Intel branded implants.
I'm talk about cyborg implants, what were you guys thinking about!!
There's a sense of irony with Apple having, apparently, no problem getting PPC emulation to work on an Intel x86 ... and Intel having no joy running x86 emulation on IA64. If I didn't know better it would look to me like IA64 is a bag of crap.
Oh, hang on.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Why waste real estate on that old, non-proprietary, open, well known and licensed x86 stuff when we can pull everyone down the rosy path towards the real goal of this HP-Intel PA-RISC-64-bit wonder? SO WE DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THE BEGGARS STEALING OUR IDEAS ANYMORE.
Mr Grove? Mr Grove? Your pacemaker's not working. We think it's the chip..... we couldn't find a way to port the code. Hello Mr Ruiz? Can you give Mr Grove a hand here? We think he's dying.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Politics. Yes, Alpha is a much superior platform, technically speaking, than pretty much anything else out there today. But for Intel to turn their back on Itanic (thank you, Register, for consistently misnaming the Itanium in such an apt way) would mean admitting that the billions of R&D they spent on it was a waste. HP also has political reasons to not resurrect Alpha.
Damn shame, that. If they'd poured as much money into Alpha as they did into Itanic, they'd have a platform that would whomp all over everything currently in the marketplace.
If I run "file" on apps in the HP-UX 11.23 userland (e.g. /bin/sh), it reports they are "IA-32" executables. That would suggest "somebody" is using IA-32 emulation, unless I'm misunderstanding the output I'm seeing...
That means x86 is a bag of crap. I bet you can emulate PPC nicely on IA64 too.
The filesystem is the package manager
Perhaps this is an indication that Intel has finally realized that their strangehold on the CPU market may be threatened by AMD? And that they will have to optimize and trim the fat off their products? Competition is good.
There's obviously a typo in this headline, which I've corrected:
Iintel Dumps Iitanium's x86 Hardware Compatibility.
C'mon Slashdot editors, get with it.
Could it be the old "not invented here" syndrome?
This is a good thing. The Itanium can emulate the x86 faster than the 'good for nothing' 486 that was on core. It's worthless and NOBODY has been using it for a LONG time.
I think removal of the x86-emulation from the Itanium CPU was overdue. It should have never made it into the chip. Every serious software developer would have re-compiled their code on the new chip anyway. What I wish to see next is a dramatic reduction of the power consumption and return to the original promise by Intel to make the Itanium a replacement of the aging x86 architecture, not only for expensive servers, but also for desktop and notebook PCs. The x86 is smashhit because it is available for so many different applications. The Itanium however was pushed into a niche.
What about the PPC emulation on the new intel macs?
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
clear off the rest of the chip, since nobody uses itanium, anyway...
Do you have ESP?
Maybe they just make it for the supercomputer folks... a niche market which is probably 10x larger and 100x more profitable than the propeller-beanie AMD fanboy crowd that trolls around here, scoffing at neon-illumiation-free chassis.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I'm not sure what your point is with that comment, Apple's emulation of the PPC architecture (Rosetta) is all done in software, which doesn't run at native speed. As I recall, the Itanium had software emulation of x86 at first, then they added I guess they added hardware emulation. Now to cut costs and chip real estate they are taking out hardware emulation and reverting to software emulation. I'm missing the irony in this particular situation. How is this ironic?
Alpha was great.
Alpha was intended to have a 25 year life. Unfortunately, it is drawing close to the end of 25 years. The design team is gone. By the time they could reconstitute it, train everyone, start a design, get it through fab, and ready for production systems, it would be close enough to 25 years that it wouldn't matter anyway. There is also the ugly N.I.H. factor which makes it unlikely they would ever revive it. I'm afraid Alpha is gone. R.I.P.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
...the confirmation from Netcraft. Is Intel dying?
Here's a surprisingly cogent article (surpisingly so for a hobbiest web site like anandtech, that is) about how trends in cpu manufacturing processes may make Itanium a bigger winner in the near future:
http://anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2598
I'm sure that both of the users of the Itanium are thrilled by this development. They should drop it and use the extra fab capacity to make 8-bit microcontrollers. There's still a market for those.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Because other people did commit to Itanium, they all need to keep spporting it at least for a reasonable amount of time (including some upgrades and spare parts).
This is good Bussines practice...
But then again, it's not a semi technical supposedly "Insightfull", anti Intel argument so most people here would not understand...
I find is odd that Intel keeps backtracking to its 20 year old Pentium Pro design. Both of their recent high-budget designs, the P4 and the Itanium proved to be a flop to some extent, while the P6/Pentium Pro/PII/PIII/Centrino/Banias architecture has scaled amazingly well since its humble 200 MHz beginnings.
Was there a generation change at the design offices? What else could have caused the most prominent chip design firm to lose its ability to do solid engineering? Granted even the golden boys created a dead end (i960) architecture, it wasn't quite as expensive a mistake as Itanium...
I remember that in the nineties new chip generations would be popping up left and right, each of them offering some really unique and cool innovation in terms of memory management, execution streamlining or heat management. But Transmeta was the last memorable innovation, and since then everyone seems to be exclusively focused on cache megabytes and transistor sizes. I would love to see real experimentation and innovation reintroduced in the CPU arena...
Face it Intel... you just can't make processors as good as AMD does. Why don't you just go back to making that other stuff you make so we- oh... right.
They'd have a platform that would whomp all over everything currently in the marketplace
Well, Alpha was a high-end CPU designed for servers. Somehow, I doubt it could whomp the portable market? (which is a important part of the computer world these days)
I think the days of it mattering what the exact instruction set is are pretty much over.
Indeed-- which is why it's hilarious that pretty much the entire world is just this moment moving to a single common unified instruction set. The server world has standardized on x86-64, Itanium is a walking corpse; the PC world has standardized on x86 as well, PPC has retreated to video game systems. We are moving to a new world of processor agnosticism, at the exact same time processor agnosticism has become largely pointless.
The same real estate is also taken up on the cheap Athlon64 we all use. In time, when theres enough x64-based software out there AMD should release 64-bit-only chips (meaning remote the legacy parts... of course there are still 32-bit instruction in a 64-bit chip (think ARM)). Since theres so much software out there already, all you need is a new bootloader. The extra space could hold more cache, initial 8mb part of the RAM space running at 1x speeds or quite possibly the southbridge chip itself to cut costs much further.
But until Windows x64 is stable, I'll continue to use the 32-bit parts of my Athlon64.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
they'd have a platform that would whomp all over everything currently in the marketplace.
And that is exactly why it isn't happening, everything currently in the marketplace is for a substantial part comming from... Intel.
The Itanium was known as Merced (for a river in Oregon or Washington, I believe), not Mercedes
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yes, I often take my Itanium servers to the WIFI enabled city park. The fresh air makes them more HA. 4U servers are very portable these days, only about 60lbs light.
Damn shame, that. If they'd poured as much money into Alpha as they did into Itanic, they'd have a platform that would whomp all over everything currently in the marketplace.
I don't know that I agree. The alpha was a particular set of optimizations. Dual register files, branch-prediction hints. pure 32bit (sub-32 bit data access had to be emulated through a multi-step process). Deep pipeline (for it's day).
But at the same time, they purposefully witheld adding out-of-order execution (plays havoc w/ their highly optimized register configuration). Sparc had similar problems with their rolling register-stack.
I studied the alpha prior to the announcement that their new version would have out-of-order, so I don't know if they ever did go that route.
The point is that by adding all of the techniques that were employed by modern CPUs (aside from slightly higher speed memory), they would not have maintained much of an advantage. Their performance would be comparable to the AMD-64, but not much faster.
I'd still love to see the alpha kept alive, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, except it's price (for general work-station use).
-Michael
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
A lot of groups seem to have somewhat given up on Itanium, or at least showed it lackluster support. Perhaps as Intel improves it, Itanium may gain more popularity.
Dell dumps Itanium
Limited Itanium support in Vista
The parent was talking about server chips for which the Alpha was one of the best.
it's spelled Iitanium in the title, it should be Itanium.
And I get to keep my karma points wheeeeeee ^_^
Now we're all gonna reminisce and be sad. Thanks.
*SNIFF* I miss the Alpha.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
The Alpha is only 14 years old at this point.The first was released in 1992.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I got a new PA-RISC machine at work. The same speed as the last one. Thanks HP!
The lag in companies like Intel and AMD is actually about 5-10 years from initial design specs to in your local store.
There is "a lot" of testing that goes into them. So even if HP [or whatever] could get a team together today the earliest we would see a design would be 2011. By then they'd have to plan well ahead for like 45nm, at least 4 cores of OOE processors with at least 1MB of 10 cycle cache each running at at least 2Ghz etc....
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Does anyone else out there think the only think keeping Itanium alive is that cancelling it would cause Intel's stock price to drop?
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
a) Basically, no one ever used hardware-based IA-32 execution, so better to use the silicon for something else,' said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. 'Of course, basically no one uses software-based emulation either HP-UX uses (used?) IA-32 emulation quite a bit - the debugger whildebeest (sp?) was a IA-32 application. I wasn't aware of this fact until I looked at it. Emulation was more or less flawless.
b) Itanium failed. It failed for many reasons. First, because it relied on compilers to generate optimal code (sequences of correctly paralellized instruction groups) to get decent performance - the world is not quite ready for this. Second, because it didn't seem to do much better than existing (Intel) processors, and thus had no reason to exit. It was a novel idea, and it was a lot of fun to play with, but ultimately more or less useless.
c) Itanium was not targetted for the desktop PC market, although they did have desktop Itanium machines available. It was definitely not targetted for laptops (doubt it could fit in one last time I looked). It was targeted at servers and had some success in that area, though (b) above still holds.
I studied the alpha prior to the announcement that their new version would have out-of-order, so I don't know if they ever did go that route.
;)
Yep, with the 21264 - aggresively out-of-order CPU. The 21064 and 21164 might not have executed instructions out-of-order, however they were highly speculative. AXP arch was designed for out-of-order from the beginning, the two early CPUs did memory IO out-of-order. 21064 had a 32 entry register file it seems, not 2, btw, according to a paperp on the AXP 21064 I found on google written by a DECy.
Their performance would be comparable to the AMD-64, but not much faster.
Agreed, cause guess what: AMD64 is Alpha's progeny-in-spirit.
The AMD K7 is very alpha-like (hence so is the K8). Highly speculative, out-of-order, wide multiple issue CPUs like the 21264. Not co-incidentally given that Dirk Meyer, co-architect of the 21264, led the AMD K7 design team. K7 used the 21164/21264 EV6 PtP interconnect too. K8 made it routable with HyperTransport - just as DEC^WCompaq did with EV6 in the 21364. You would still expect this mythical equivalently developed Alpha to beat AMD64 though, given it'd be able to use the die-space 'wasted' on x86-decoding for something more productive (cache or somesuch).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Basically no one uses Itanium, so we can save even more by getting rid of the Itanium instruction set. That leaves us with the cache, and we can bolt that onto one of our AMD-clone 64-bit processors and maybe get some bucks.
why not dump Itanium compatibility and just go back to Alpha?
Because all the old Alpha engineers now work for AMD =D
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Software like Transitive's QuickTransit (Apple licenses it as "Rosetta") is setting new records for emulation speed due to integration with the native operating system and caching
QuickTransit is already available with a Itanium back-end (allowing x86, MIPS, POWER/PowerPC code to run on an Itanium)... And considering the insanely high number of registers on the Itanium (16x that of the x86), emulation should be extremely fast.
Nothing unusual. Most American girls breast fake. Stupid girls. Yes. In Soviet
Russia we judge women by how much hair is under arms and on legs. You can't fake that!
lol
Considering that Itanium, P4, Athlon, and Opteron are totally useless for portable systems... what's your point? You don't use a 100W chip in a laptop. Intel maintains the P3 line for portables, and AMD has their own separate line of portable chips.
Alpha was used in everything up to supercomputers, too. You may have heard of Cray Supercomputing? They used Alpha processors.
You know why nobody uses any of that stuff? Because nobody uses the Itanium.
http://chrono.posterous.com/
The x86 was never used on itanium ? crap.
Sure ist was ( and I assume is ) used - for the firmware. IIRC, the EFI-firmware of the Itanium boxen was entirely x86. They use the x86-ISA for running the x86-based firmware of add-on cards. That way, Itanium boxen are able to use about any PCI-card out there, without
them having any special firmware.
Alphas did that in software, which mostly worked but far from working with everthing.
SPARCs and the PowerPC-based Apples have PCI, but neither is able to handle standard
PCI-cards for exacty that reason, which is why you have to shrug off $$$ to get the same
PCI-hardware with their native firmware support.
Ok, any PCI-card stuffed in an Itanium box would need decent OS-drivers, but at least
that is in the realm of the OS-vendor and drivers can be ported. Only very few
PCI HW-manufacturers ever did anything but x86 firmware, geared towards BIOS.
EFI, the firmware that ships with Itaniums, is quite good at handling that crappy
PC-BIOS type firmware. Need a decent RAID-controller ? Just stuff it in.
I'd call that a big plus. There are and have been numerous misconceptions about Itanium
from the very beginning, but saying "Nobody needs on-chip x86" is utterly stupid.
IIRC, the chip "real-estate" needed for x86 was in the lowish single-digit percentage
of the total chip-real estate. And it was a good investment, since it saves $$$ for
anybody running Itaniums. It was there for exactly that purpose, until some marketing
freak obviously decided to sell that as "backwards compatibility". x86 on Itanium was
and is dead slow, but for POST/Init purposes, it is sufficient.
Please, intel, keep it. If Itanium is ever going to be a success, users will happily
welcome the ability to extend systems using standard off-the-shelf components.
And, while we are at it, start shipping EFI for the "x86-crowd" now. I think, i am not
alone with the perception, that hitting "CTRL-S", "ESC whatsoever" at the right moment
during POST to enter some firmware configuration tool of some card, just plain sucks.
I want a firmware shell. I want x86-style SRM. EFI is close to that. Intel even
open-sourced major parts of EFI ( www.tianocore.org ). AFAIK, the Intel-based Apples
will use it. I want it too.
For gods sake, keep x86 in Itaniums.
Regards
N/T
The designers of the AS400 didn't go to 2048 bits, but every address is 128 bits from day 1 for just the reason you mention.
Circling both nipples, in tattoed blue; Intel Inside.
In Soviet Russia, fake tits up you.
eh...
Defining Statistics and Social Research
itanic - x86 - (grandeur delusions) = alpha
makes perfect sense. why cripple a new design with legacy support. no one buys an itanium2 to run legacy x86 applications. Most Itanium2 users run linux, and probably have the source code, or are buying from a vendor that will build native binaries at this end of the market.
Outside of Intel that is, When intel was first developing the Itanium, without x86 compatibility originally , I was granted access to their hardware through their SDV program, I ported Bochs over, it took about 2 days with most changes being in the assy routines, it wasnt so bad, its kinda funny, as the project became a total waste as they introduced this at the hardware level.
j pg
This whole Itanium fiasco is why I sold my intel stock and looked for other vendors, http://bochs.sourceforge.net/screenshot/whistler.
I think it was 2000 or so.....It looks good on a resume along with 100 other useless things like it....
-
Lots of code we want to run has no source code available. Think MS Office for instance. (Ok, who would run that on an Itanium, I know...)
-
32-bit code performs better for some workloads because pointers are smaller. If your data structures contain lots of pointers then you might find a substantial performance boost because the smaller pointers lead to a smaller cache/TLB footprint. (Ok, Itanium's hardware emulation was slow enough that this point wouldn't hold anyway...)
-
Some of the best JVMs don't support Itanium, and even for those that do, see point #2.
Yes, it makes sense to drop hardware emulation from Itanium, but not for the reasons you mention.Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
You can't just recompile 32-bit source code and expect it to work on 64-bit hardware unless (a) you're using a wordsize-agnostic language, or (b) you have written your code very carefully with 64-bit compatibility in mind.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Is that a metric or imperial buttload?
Iintel Dumps Iitanium's x86 Hardware Compatibility.
The extra "i" is for "idiot".
we all know the champion is Brazil, there it is really difficult to find a girl not having a fake body part.
One of the most significant events in computer history was IBM abandoning tubes for transistors and a new architecture for the 360 series.
This is finally happening again. There will be a great deal of moaning about having to upgrade all the software then we will step into a great new world of higher performance!
UNLESS - we bung the whole thing up with DRM.
With DRM built in we will buy our computers, own our computers, pay for our computers, but they won't be working for US - they'll be working for THEM.
This is how the very rich get very richer. Make the CLIENT pay for THEIR security.
This can still all end in tears.
Chicks Have All The Fun
Intel announced this over a year ago.
"You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Itanium's future. The hand writing has been on the wall since at least December 2004, when Hewlett-Packard handed over development and ownership of the Itanium platform to Intel. Soon after, vendors including IBM, Microsoft, and Dell began withdrawing their support for the Itanium processor.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
# Chip speed of 1.6 GHz, down from the originally expected 2.4 GHz
# Front side bus speed of 400 MHz, down from 667 MHz
# On-chip Level 3 cache, down from 24 MB (12 MB per core)
to an undisclosed number
All major surveys show that Itanium has steadily declined in market share.
Fact: Itanium is dead"
Xenu loves you!
They'd have to rework the i386 compatibility anyway to handle AMD64 instructions. And it would be a real embarassment to have two 64-bit processors on the same die (the failed one and the successful one).
Perhaps it would be easier for Intel to just ship a Xeon processor supporting the AMD64 instructions, and do the Itanic support as a software emulation.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The whole Itanium story made me do a slip about HP involvement... Of course it was Apple! ;-)
Paul B.
Everyone I've ever given head to (a LOT of people) says its the best they've ever had. Well guys this is why, so try and make your man happy.
1.I LOVE to do it. It absolutely turns me on more than recieving it. I get a massive stiffy, sometimes I even shoot my load, without masturbating.
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