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Microsoft Announces End of the Line For Itanium Support
WrongSizeGlass writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has announced on its Windows Server blog the end of its support for Itanium. 'Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2010 will represent the last versions to support Intel's Itanium architecture.' Does this mean the end of Itanium? Will it be missed, or was it destined to be another DEC Alpha waiting for its last sunset?"
How could anyone possibly have any use for servers that don't run Windows?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Were many Itanium users running Windows? My impression was that most Itanium users were running some sort of *nix. I don't think it's a huge deal for Itanium.
I also don't see Itanium going anywhere any time soon. As much as people like to talk about its demise, its numbers do grow every year. Or at least they were growing up until a couple years ago; I assume they're still growing. They're not growing very quickly, but they're still going.
It's a shame. It's a remarkably beautifully designed architecture, especially when it was first designed (1991-ish?). It's a shame no one can build a good chip for it or write a decent compiler for it :P
It would appear that the good ship Itanic has struck an MS Iceberg 2010 Datacenter Edition R2!
Seriously, though: is this an admission by Microsoft that HP-UX is(somehow) hanging on at the high end, despite HP's every attempt to mismanage it, or (more likely) is this a consequence of the fact that, at this point, there is nothing Itanium can do that Intel couldn't do better and cheaper just by bolting some extra cache and a few extra Itanium features onto Xeons?
With Alpha finally gone for good, its job is done and it can now sail off into the West.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Intel no longer supports Itanium in some of their own projects on Windows. For example, Intel Threading Building Blocks has x86 and a x86-64 support, but lacks Itanium support on Windows. It does however support Itanium on Linux.
Itanium has not been worth it in terms of price/performance for a while, this just confirms the inevitable. However, people will still be running this hardware for some time, and I expect HPUX and Linux to continue to support this hardware for the forseeable future. Hell, Debian supports the Alpha, and the M68k was removed from official support in just the previous revision of Debian (etch), but then only because it took too long to compile and would slow down the updates of the archives.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Nah, the real "end" would be if HP finally bows to the inevitable and ports HPUX to x64. Don't hold your breath though....
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
I am incredibly offended that you would compare this bloated, brute-force, abomination of a chip to the incredibly well designed, elegant, and efficient Alpha (may it rest in peace).
The DEC Alpha was a much better chip than the Intel Itanium; and not just in the way that Johnny Mathis is way better than Diet Pepsi.
The DEC Alpha was a brilliant RISC processor that could outrun a closet full of x86 chips of the same era (or even the era after). The DEC Alpha was sold by a hardware company that distributed their own Unix-derived OS for it that had the proper compilers ready to go as soon as the system was booted. The Itanium, on the other hand, was an odd attempt by Intel to make a 64bit CPU that could - mostly - run 32bit code as well. Unfortunately by the time the Itanium was released the Intel-Microsoft pairing was well established for most consumers and people wanted it to run Windows Server; which it didn't do particularly well.
So the Itanium may end up killed by the combined factors of lack of a market, lack of consumer interest, lack of consumer knowledge, and poor deployment. The DEC Alpha, on the other hand, was killed by upper level management who didn't seem to know what they had.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Does this mean the end of Itanium? Will it be missed, or was it destined to be another DEC Alpha waiting for its last sunset?
Kinda funny to make that comparison since the Alpha was killed to enable the Itanium. (Long story involving HP making a deal with Intel to hand over the last of PA-RISC/Itanium processor development to Intel and DEC killing Alpha at the same time to clear out the market since HP was in the process of purchasing DEC/Compaq, although the acquisition was not yet public at the time of the cpucide).
But I doubt its the end of Itanium. Itanium models have things that even the latest Xeons don't in terms of RAS. Most customers don't care about the level of fault tolerance and reliability, but the ones who can't migrate to linux (or Windows) because they are dependent on features of more proprietary OSes like Tandem (now HP) NonStop do need Itanium, and their software is unlikely to be ported to x86 anytime soon (it took at roughly 4 years to get NonStop ported to Itanium to begin with).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
In addition to HPUX, OpenVMS and NonStop both require Itanium hardware. Itanium might be relegated to a role like IBM's Power chips, but it's not dead yet, Jim.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Well kind of. Red Hat recently announced that they were dropping Itanium starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. How long will it be before the rest of the distro gang follow suit?
The microwave is broke so how am I supposed to cook lunch if they drop the Itaniums?
Like we are going to see happen with SPARC too im afraid.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Windows on IA-64 can't be dying until Netcraft confirms it!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
They all get outmoded.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Going AC on this so as not to damage my past, present and future reputation.
I've been in a datacenter or two, and I've seen x86(64), SPARC (legacy stuff), and IBM z series for production web/Java stuff.
What other CPU architectures are used somewhat widely?
No one can stop the x86 train, not even Intel.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
We used to support HP-UX, Sun/Solaris, Iris-SGI, WinNT, and DEC-Alpha. We have used all kinds of tools like Purify and Boundschecker to make sure the code is robust. But the best platform to test the code was Dec-Alpha. None of the software tools are as capable of DEC in sniffing out bad programming errors. At the slightest whiff of an array bound violation or freeing an unallocated memory or mixing delete with delete [], the damn thing will crash. Sometimes it would crash if someone near by sneezed. Absolutely painful thing to debug and fix the errors. But once your code runs without crashing in DEC-Alpha you don't have to run purify or boundschecker! There was one Government customer who used to demand we support DEC-Alpha. We tried hard to ditch the platform. That agency would pay us two engineer year worth of maintenance and give us two machines to build and test!
I think Galadriel is probably a more apt comparison.
Itanium has not been worth it in terms of price/performance for a while
Actually, in many categories, it does. Depends on the work to be done. For example, HP Integrity Superdome with HP/UX leads in price / performance and performance running TCP-H on 10 or 30TB Oracle database. Some on numerical benchmarks that are heavily SMP.
I don't like the Itanium, but certain database and numerical workloads it still kicks everyone else's butts.
Now I won't have to decline all those useless Itanium updates in WSUS console every month.
Yep. One of the best remaining reasons for the continued existence of Itanium is the HP NonStop servers, linear descendants of the Tandem NonStop mainframes. HP had Intel add features to the Itanium chips that would allow them to do some of the processor pairing tricks that were used in Tandem mainframes. I have no idea how hard it would be to retrofit an equivalent feature into the x86-64 design, but that's one of the few reasons for people to still want to buy Itaniums.
IBM's Power chips make up the main processor(s) for the Xbox360 and PS3, so are you saying that the Itanium will end up in multiple consoles found in millions of homes?
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
So MS is retiring support for hardware that was released this year (Itanium 9300), yet Apple gets slammed for retiring support on hardware that is 5 years old?
Oh come on. It's really disingenuous to be quoting that kind of shit. Have you ever taken a really close look at the kind of hardware the vendors use to get these benchmark numbers? Database app benchmarks are almost always very sensitive to I/O, and these kinds of numbers are usually generated by systems that have their I/O card slots max'd out, with several hundred (if not thousands) of small high speed disks behind them. The cost of these solutions in real life would be crippling. Vendor quoted benchmarks should usually be taken with a generous pinch of salt.
This is a response to my own post. Sometimes after uncorking a minor screed, I note to myself "that was more obnoxious than normal" and then my subconscious goes "ding!" and I get what's grinding me.
The secret of x86 longevity is to have been so coyote-ugly that it turns into pablum the brain of any x86-hater who tries to make a chip to rid the planet of the scourge once and for all.
For three decades right-thinking chip designers have *wanted* x86 to prove as bad in reality as ugliness ought to dictate.
Instead of having a balanced perspective on beauty, the x86-haters succumb to the rule of thumb that the less like x86, the better. And almost always, that lead to a mistake, because x86 was never in fact rotten to the gore. You need a big design team, and it bleeds heat, but all other respects, it proved salvageable over and over and over again.
On the empirical evidence, high standards of beauty in CPU design are overrated. Instead, we should have been employing high standards of pragmatic compromise.
If any design team had aimed merely for "a hell of lot less ugly", instead of becoming mired in some beauty-driven conceptual over-reaction, maybe x86 might have died already.
Maybe instruction sets aren't meant to be beautiful. Of course, viewed that way, this is an age-old debate.
The Rise of ``Worse is Better''
Empirically, x86 won.
The lingering question is this: is less worse less better, or was there a way out, and all the beauty mongers failed to find it?
oh what will we do now windows no longer supporting are server oh wait guess we will go with the 85% of other servers that are not windows. running windows on a server is just asking for it not to work.
HP really needs Intel to fab the chip, not design it. http://duiattorneyorangecountyca.com/
Last time I was playing with it (caliper/HP-UX), it was doing up to around 1 instruction per cycle on average. Not very impressive but also not very bad either. It was three years ago, so I doubt that compilers would improve dramatically since then. And it has about half a clock speed Xeons have.
Now, since we have Nehalem EX and similiar monsters available, there is not much left on performance/scalability front for all those RISC designs, no matter how cool those designs are. The only thing keeping them alive is their hard-to-break-big-iron designs and hard-to-break-big-iron (system) software. Vendors might struggle to port these things onto now conventional x86_64 designs as they risk losing significant income stream doing so. But in the long run most of these things will be dead or become niches. The only area RISC will still shine are energy constrained environments (ARM?) and maybe some manycore designs, like some forms of GPUs evolving in this direction. In other words, the original area where RISC thingies started.
Note that I'm not trashing RISC here - this was a pretty neat idea. It's just history showing a bitter sense of humor: memory bandwidth is now a bottleneck and x86 code is known to be compact.
Marathon Technology provides a hypervisor that gives the same effect with commodity x86 crap: you run two nodes in parallel, they are kept perfectly in sync, and if either of them fails then the other takes over. This same functionality is now in the main Xen tree and will be released as part of Xen 4. The overhead of the Itanium version is probably lower, but I doubt it's lower by enough of a margin to make it cheaper.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, alpha will be dropped in lenny+1:
http://release.debian.org/squeeze/arch_qualify.html
Indeed, more details at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/10/msg00000.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2009/07/msg00015.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2009/08/msg00005.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2009/10/msg00003.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2009/10/msg00004.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2009/10/msg00011.html
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
not shit, I work for HP VAR and we sell systems that have hundreds of spindles in disk arrays. And a few millions of dollars spent on hardware is chicken shit compared to total cost of major project.