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HP's NonStop Servers Go x86, Countdown To Itanium Extinction Begins
An anonymous reader writes "HP has been the sole holdout on the Itanium, mostly because so much of the PA-RISC architecture lives on in that chip. However, the company recently began migration of Integrity Superdome servers from Itanium to Xeon, and now it has announced that the top of its server line, the NonStop series, will migrate to x86 as well, presumably the 15-core E7 V2 Intel will release next year. So while no one has said it, this likely seems the end of the Itanium experiment, one that went on a lot longer than it should have, given its failure out of the gate."
Also, Itanic
Meh. This pretty much describes IA64/Itanic, as well as any "news" related to it.
OTOH, you will be able to get those in eBay even cheaper, Debian runs on it just fine, and shellcode for IA64 is pretty much nonexistant.
Not a single major hardware or device maker seems ready to support Linux on non-Intel architectures. Intel, MS, HP, Cisco etc. are part of the TCPA alliance; even Linux on ARM based servers have taken a very long time to arrive.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
given its failure out of the gate.
For a multibillion dollar industry, "failure" is a rather strong term. It may be declining, but it topped over $4.4bn a year at one point. That's probably bigger than AMD.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Earlier this year HP announced the end of the line for VMS. That was certainly connected with the Itanium retirement as well.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
I work on a product that supports Itanium, and we have a few customer that are still using Itanium servers, who knows why. We just discovered that unless you get the top-tier developer subscription to Microsoft Visual Studio, you don't get Itanium compilers.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Tandem on the x86! Intel is making an x86 cell phone. You know what this means? Tandem on a cell phone! Now all we need is a touch interface for TACL.
#tandem4life
Now if only the IPV6 community would see the parallels between IA64 and AMD64...
Based on the amusing idea that compilers can more easily determine which instructions can be executed simultaneously at compile time than the CPU can at run time...
Years ago one of my friends had the misfortune to have to write code generators for a CPU which required the compiler to determine whether a previous pipelined instruction had completed before reading the result because there were no interlocks to stall the CPU if it hadn't. He could have told Intel a thing or two about trusting software engineers to schedule instructions rather than CPU designers.
Let me count the ways
And there was much rejoicing!
And nothing of value was lost.
For those saying it wasn't a failure you must look at what Intel intended Itanium for. If they had succeeded Intel would have owned the 64 bit CPU realm on the desktop with a proprietary architecture effectively eliminating any competition in the space. To succeed they had to get all popular software including Windows to be rewritten for the new processor. This was a daunting task and few were ready at the time to make the switch to 64 bit. AMD introduced the Opteron in 2003 with their 64 bit extensions for the existing x86 architecture which allowed the reuse of the 32 bit code in existence. AMD's x86-64 was well received and Intel ultimately adopted the architecture in their own processors. So yes the Itinaium failed to succeed in its intended task despite lingering for over a decade.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Went on for too long? Itanium's the platform for VMS, as in, only platform if you want new iron that runs VMS w/o emulation. Plenty "legacy" control systems run on VMS, so we'll see where all that goes.
Unfortunately it became a legend for all of the wrong reasons. Billions of dollars have been sunk into it over the years and many lawsuits have been filed over it demise by vendors desperate to get out of it or force another vendor to stay in it.
http://www.eweek.com/servers/hp-to-seek-4-billion-in-damages-from-oracle-over-itanium/
http://news.cnet.com/Allies-pledge-10-billion-to-boost-Itanium/2100-1006_3-6031773.html
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2013/09/hudson_intel_plant_closing_wil.html
Unfortunately sales never came close to the billions of dollars that have been sunk into it, and it has been that way for years:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/28/itanium_04_sales/
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/hpearnings/
http://www.zdnet.com/photos/charts-mining-itanium/21115
I'm sure someone has a comparison of how much money has been invested compared to how much money has been made in sales. I might be mistaken, but from what I've been reading from the beginning Itanium has never come close to breaking even for hardware or software sales. Certainly companies like HP and Oracle spent millions of dollars on their lawsuit trying to get out Itanium.
Itanium has always been nothing more than a desperate multi-billion dollar effort to break free from the chains of x86.
Looks like it's the end of the line for OpenVMS as well.
I would pay good, American money, to have OpenVMS open-sourced instead of just languishing like other DEC OS's. Why can't RSTS/E or RSX-11 be free? What could that possibly cost HP? Same with OpenVMS at this point. It's a great system, and I would love to see it available to average joes.
Someone who isn't as lazy as I am should start an "Open Source OpenVMS!" petition.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
I'm sure HP has been staring this one down forever, saying "We sunk all this money into Itanium, there's no way we can abandon it." In fact, if you look at the documents from HP's lawsuit that Oracle helpfully put up on their website, you can see internal discussions of their intention to port HP-UX to x86 and the fact that they're basically paying Intel to keep developing Itanium processors for them.
Itanium was an interesting idea, and the only way to get 64-bit non-Sun, non-IBM hardware until the Opteron came out. But it's a really good example of a technology hanging on way past the point where it's relevant.
I wonder if they've inadvertently sent OpenVMS to the old folks' home by doing this...unless they're planning to port OpenVMS to x86. I know there's plenty of legacy OpenVMS stuff out there, but who knows if those customers would be willing to finance a port by buying machines from HP?
I also wonder if at least some of the ProLiant line is going to get that awesome RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) that NonStop and the Itanium boxes have. That would be cool.
Did Itanium have any performance advantage over x86_64? It certainly didn't have a price advantage, if anything it was horrendously expensive for the performance you got.
We only have a SINGLE Itanium based server here, purchased more out of curiosity than anything else, years ago when the platform was new. There's nothing special about it whatsoever.
I keep thinking the platform should have been declared a failure years ago, unless there was some specific thing it was really good at that I'm not aware of...
It's intent was to kill DEC's Alpha chip. In that it succeeded.
It's point was that it came out before the AMD x86_64, so if you adopted early how can you even compare.
> How hard it is to maintain code for that thing.
It's that hard. That company (hint: US gov't) actually had to hire a time-travelling confederate soldier of fortune to fetch an 1975 era IBM 5100 desktop debug system of that platform for them them. No kidding!
Leaving us with the crummiest architecture of all contenders as the market leader.
But why should hardware have it better than software?
Until there is a supported COBOL environment in Linux, HP-UX on Itanium will be around for a long time.
I work in the power industry, and we use some very specific applications that are only available on HP-UX and AIX. HP-UX is by far their largest install base.
These apps are used by the power plants/coal mines for everything. As you'd expect, there are very few applications that are certified for use by the power industry that meet the regulations. The one we use will begin supporting LDAP instead of NIS next year.
There's no incentive for new players in this software market due to the small number of potential customers and the massive trust curve they'd have to meet to make somebody switch.
We're one of the reasons there's a pretty long road map for Itaniums and HP-UX.
My mom says I'm cool.
when HP/UX x86-64 port is out, then Itanium2 will be dead
Ah, classic.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
What are the people at Intel thinking? Where did they get 15-core from? Are they making a 16-core CPU knowing there's always going to be one bad core? Why not make a 17-core CPU instead? 15-core seems odd, it's always been 1,2,4 or 8 cores AFAIK.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
HP had Intel put a ton of RAS features that are needed for the Nonstop and Superdome lines into the Itanium chip, in addition it ran modified 64bit code originally targeted at Alpha, MIPS, and NonStop processors, something which couldn't be done with x86. Basically it was a way for HP to jettison all the legacy hardware from their acquisitions over the years and merge them into one "commodity" chip that they could buy from Intel.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
... going to write FORTRAN 77 code in OpenVMS? No seriously, what's OpenVMS going to do?
IA64 started as an HP Labs project to be a new instruction set to replace HP's PA-RISC. VLIW has a hot topic around 1995. HP Labs was always proposing stuff and the development groups (those making chips/systems) ignored it, but for some reason this had legs.
The HP executive culture is: HP hired mid-level executives from outside. They would then do something big to get a bigger job in another company. A lot of HP's poor decisions in the last 20 years can be directly traced to this culture. And there was no downside--if you failed, you'd go to an equivalent job at another company to try again.
So enterprising HP executives turned HP's VLIW project into a partnership with Intel, and in return HP got access to Intel's fabs. This was not done for technical reasons. Intel wanted a 64-bit architecture with patents to lock out AMD, and would never buy PA-RISC. So it had to be new. HP was behind the CPU performance curve by 1995 due to its own internal fab not keeping up with the industry due to HP not wanting to spend money. So HP could save billions in fab costs if Intel would fab HP's PA-RISC CPU chips until IA64 took off. So, for these non-technical reasons, IA64 was born, and enough executives at both companies became committed enough to guarantee it would ship.
For a while, this worked well for HP. The HP CPUs went from 360MHz to 550MHz in one generation, then pretty quickly up to 750MHz. I thought IA64 would be canceled many times, but then it became clear that Intel was fully committed, and they did get Merced out the door only 2 years late. IA64 was a power struggle inside Intel, with the IA64 group trying to wrest control from the x86 group. That's where the "IA64 will replace x86" was coming from--but even inside Intel many people knew that was unlikely. Large companies easily can do two things at once--try something, but have a backup plan in case it doesn't work.
But IA64 as an architecture is a huge mess. It became full of every performance idea anyone ever had. This just meant there was a lot of complexity to get right, and many of the first implementations made poor implementation choices. It was a bad time for a new architecture--designed for performance, IA64 missed out on the power wall about to hit the industry hard. It also bet too heavily on compiler technology, which again all the engineers knew would be a problem. But see the above non-technical reasons--IA64 was going to happen, performance features had to be put in to make it crush the competition and be successful. The powerpoint presentations looked impressive. It didn't work out--performance features ended up lowering the clock speed and delaying the projects, and hurting overall performance.
Itanium would have allowed Intel to dump all the x86 baggage and move the world to a Brave New Shinier CPU that was 64-bit and appeared to offer substantially better performance.
And it would have made them sole supplier for the mainstream CPU market, taking out AMD and the other clone x86 makers.
Unfortunately, the early compilers sucked and x86 emulation really, really, really sucked, so no-one with a big investment in x86 software was going to make the switch. If I remember correctly, it was also years late, so performance that would have been impressive at the initial release date had become 'meh' by the time it actually hit the market.
The (sh)Itanium was a boondoggle for Intel, HP, and others- more that it's execution was so flawed from the get-go than anything else.
Time to let it die and pour effort into something with better legs. MIPS and ARM come immediately to mind as good front-runners if you're going the "ditching X86" route. X86 probably ought to go the same route. While it's "fast" it's because all the effort that could've been put into real performance enhacnements went into kludging the beast. If you put the same effort into either of the currently extant usable performance RISCs, you'd get even higher levels of performance with less power consumption (Though more than with the current MIPS and ARM answers...).
For those who don't remember.
NonStop used to be Tandem, whic was acquired by Compaq, which got acquired by HP.
Tandem had proprietary hardware, proprietary operating system, and even proprietary languages. It was big in high availability stuff, like bank networks running ATMs, ...etc.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
less than a fraction of 1 percent
99999/100000 is a fraction, so are you saying it is now 99.998%, which rounds up to 1%?
Linux ports of just about every major CPU exists - SPARC, MIPS, Power/POWER, PA-RISC, Alpha, Itanic, in addition to x64. Main issue is that of these, Alpha, PA-RISC and MIPS V are dead, and of the remainder, current Linux distros have dropped support. Red Hat, for instance, supported SPARC at one time, but no longer does. IBM supports Linux on POWER, which is why it's there. HP pushes mainly HP/UX for Itanium, aside from legacy customers who bought Integrity servers for VMS or NonStop. As a result, most Linux distros are x64 only.
If one has an Itanic box - the only one I know of is the Integrity line from HP which they are converting now to x64 - then the only choice as far as Linux goes is Debian, which never retires any CPU. Or, if one prefers the BSDs, one can go w/ FreeBSD. Other than that, w/ the Integrity, one can go HP/UX, and w/ other Itanic boxes, such as ex-SGIs, one is stuck w/ Linux or FreeBSD.
Once this line goes x86, how are they different from anybody else - their own ProLiant line, or top end servers from IBM or Dell? Also, are they planning to migrate HP/UX to x64, or will they simply migrate HP/UX customers to Lintel (Linux on x64)? If it's the latter, their customers have probably beaten them to it by probably more than a decade
So once this line is x64, there will be nobody who's making Itanium servers, will there? Or will it be a China only CPU - w/ customers like Huawei? So does that mean that Intel will finally put the Itanic out of its misery?
Those were 2 different MIPS line. MIPS V was what went into servers from SGI, and got replaced first w/ Itanic, and then w/ x64. The MIPS that goes into high-end embedded or even low end embedded is MIPS IV and III (R8000 & R4x00)
Everyone seems to be cheering at this event, but it seems to me HP just wants to close down some of its NonProfitable(tm) divisions.
First VMS, now this. This won't end well.
Well, it may be multi-billion-dollar industry, but it spectacularly failed to meet its sales projections. My absolute favorite Itanium sales chart can be found here. Granted some of those initial projections were crazy stupid. But it fell short of even the much more modest, revised projections from 2002 and 2003.
Damned shame that they killed Alpha and with that move doomed VMS. The Itanium port didn't help expand the VMS base, since there wasn't enough support to VARs to keep the support for VMS in applications. There are only two viable OS choices now. Windows and Linux/Unix. (And the Unix part is weakening over time due to costs vs. Linix).
I fully agree w/ this. Compaq would have done better keeping the Alpha, and HP should have sold Alpha to someone other than Intel. Alpha would have been a perfect platform for 64-bit Windows, in addition to OpenVMS. HP turned out to have made a bad call in deciding to migrate from PA-RISC to Itanium: if PA-RISC was expensive to design & maintain, it would have been cheaper for them to simply sell it to Intel (which was already fabbing it anyway) and ask Intel to design & make it for them. Intel could then have competed at the high end against POWER & Alpha w/ PA-RISC, while still having x86. They wouldn't have had to license x64 from AMD, but instead, since PA-RISC was already well supported by HP/UX & Linux, they could have either promoted PA-Linux or gotten Microsoft to port 64-bit Windows to the platform. That way, they would have gotten a successful architecture exclusively their own, w/o the failure that came w/ the Itanic.
No, it didn't. Reason HP went w/ it was the perception that since RISC was faster than CISC, which got proven by Intel building in all sort of RISC based concepts into the Pentium, which included moving some of the complexity of a CPU to compilers, VLIW could be faster as a result of moving all of the complexity of a CPU - even a RISC CPU - into the compiler.
Main issue w/ that, even before the project started - was the fact that in VLIW, since everything - register renaming, speculative execution - is moved from the CPU to the compiler, w/ every CPU generation, unless all you do is bump up the GHz as well as the cache, any change to a CPU would necessitate recompilation of existing software to get any performance improvement: running existing binaries would show no improvements whatsoever. That alone should have killed the idea.
As it turned out, RISC was an optimal spot b/w CISC & VLIW. While Pentium adapted a lot of RISC concepts like superscalar execution, expanded register sets and branch prediction, Itanium too smuggled in RISC practices like Register Renaming, which is supposed to be gotten rid of in VLIW. In the meantime, RISC CPUs such as Alpha 21364 & POWER adapted some VLIW concepts such as smarter compilers that extract more parallelism, MIMD operations and so on. So HP would have done better in selling Intel the PA-RISC and Intel improving that rather than starting out w/ this VLIW concept.
Is Windows 2003 server on Itanic native, or does it run under x86 emulation?
Itanium was planned before 64-bit versions of x86 arrived. So you've got the question backwards: what were advantages of x86_64 over Itanium?
Itanium was trying to ditch x84. Just like many people, Intel also hated the x86 and hated being tied down to it with a never ending backward's compatibility ball and chain. Meanwhile RISC was doing great, and all the decent workstations out there were running on RISC chips whereas x86 was stuck on lower end PCs, and compilers were getting good enough to get decent performance out of RISC as well. So that was the plan: get a "modern" CPU and remove reliance on the old stuff that wasn't scaling up.
What happened though was getting the 64 bit extensions to x86, allowing larger memory spaces without breaking compatibility with Windows, plus advances in Pentium allowed them to get RISC like performance under the hood while having a CISC decoder on top. Over time the 64-bit extensions expanded and became more useful as well, until there was a full 64-bit architecture. The drawback of course was that it's essentially a 64-bit system with a 32-bit leftover kludge bolted on, exactly the same as the 386 was a 32-bit system with a 16-bit kludge for compatibility reasons. And the IA64 architecture still retains a lot of design decisions that wouldn't make sense in a designed-from-scratch system.
Itanium didn't fail because it wasn't as good a design, it failed because it wasn't a series of small incremental improvements. Thus lots of development costs up front which are necessary for ANY new high performance design. After some time that funding slows down. Meanwhile lots and lots of funding is still going into continuous small improvements to x86 style chips, and Intel is stuck with it.
Alpha and MIPS are completely different than IA64. Alpha was a true RISC chip with a fixed 32-bit instruction length, superscalar, out-of-order execution. IA64 was a VLIW chip with in-order execution that relies on the compiler to do anything efficient.
HP made a fatal mistake cancelling PA-RISC and Alpha in favor of IA64. The could have picked either of the other two as a successor, and have been better off as a result. Instead they chose a dead-end, probably because (at the time) it looked like the entire hardware industry would go that way. Before SGI, IBM, Dell and others backed out.
HP didn't want to be in the chip business, which is why they sold the IP and engineers to Intel in exchange for long term contracts to produce Itanium. I very much realize that Itanium is vastly different from either PA-RISC or Alpha, but code originally written for either could and was ported to Itanium, something which could not be easily done with x86 (remember this is pre-x64 aka AMD64). You say it was a fatal mistake, but the HP Enterprise business group still brings in billions a year more than a decade after they jettisoned the baggage of making chips, and now they get to move the customers who are still with them over to x64 which means they can stop paying Intel whatever fees they are paying to keep making new Itanium chips further reducing their overhead. As long as the cost reduction through stopping the chip business was less than the lost revenue from whatever businesses jumped ship it was a sound economic decision and based on the size and profitability of the enterprise group I'd say it was.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
or will they simply migrate HP/UX customers to Lintel (Linux on x64)?
One can only hope, HP-UX has been walking dead for years. 11.31 is six years old, 11.00 was released in 1997. It is at best an edge on an edge case, I want both the Itanium and HP-UX to go away. We have enough choice with Linux, Solaris, and AIX.
The platform was declared a failure by many years ago. The reason it survived so long was HP had VMS and Tandem customers. And HP made it such that the Itanic was their only ship sailing on their routes. Those who could leave got off along the way, the rest keep on paying.
If you look at the old SPEC figures you can see that it was a few times faster in a few tasks (and slower in others). However I believe many of those tasks were "embarrassingly parallel". So instead of buying one Itanic box you could buy two or more x86 boxes for the same price and get about the same performance for that workload and have more flexibility (better performance for other tasks). And possibly not use that much more power either - the Itanic was quite power hungry too!
The MBA crapper who ran HP then (Lew Platt) could not think in terms of "let's outfox semiconductor behemoth Intel". All he could think was "oh, let's admit defeat and become their vasall. They are sooo much bigger in their semiconductor ops".
HP had tremendous talent, thrown in front of the MBA pigs. Pigs are only interested in morsels, not talent. So, a fine company WASTED.
Engineers - let the MBAs take over at the expense of your own future.
Your comment not a rational assessment of the actual situatuon. x86 code is indeed a bit kludgy. But it is also much more compact than typical RISC code. Variable instruction length is actually a virtue !
It will matter a lot when it comes to cache efficiency and to generl memory efficiency. "RISC is better than x86" is like saying "Central planning is better than free enterprise". In some ways central planning is indeed better. Say, when you need to design and build make nukes at the fastest possible schedule. But you know what ? Blinky cars, yoghurt and choclatte bars won the cold war.