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Intel's Itanium CPUs, Once a Play For 64-bit Servers And Desktops, Are Dead (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the moving-on dept.

Reader WheezyJoe writes: Four new 9700-series Itanium CPUs will be the last and final Itaniums Intel will ship. For those who might have forgotten, Itanium and its IA-64 architecture was intended to be Intel's successor to 32-bit i386 architecture back in the early 2000's. Developed in conjunction with HP, IA-64 used a new architecture developed at HP that, while capable as a server platform, was not backward-compatible with i386 and required emulation to run i386-compiled software. With the release of AMD's Opteron in 2003 featuring their alternative, fully backward-compatible X86-64 architecture, interest in Itanium fell, and Intel eventually adopted AMD's technology for its own chips and X86-64 is now dominant today. In spite of this, Itanium continued to be made and sold for the server market, supported in part by an agreement with HP. With that deal expiring this year, these new Itaniums will be Intel's last.

3 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. It was still alive? by TWX · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I guess I just sort of assumed that IA-64 was dead a long time ago, and figured Intel's gaming the benchmarks was essentially retribution against AMD for the success of amd64 architecture.

    Does anyone remember the reasoning for dropping native support for i386 when these processors debuted? There have always been growing-pains when a manufacturer drops or severely impacts support for their install-base, but sometimes it's beneficial or necessary if an existing architecture is a dead-end.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:It was still alive? by F.Ultra · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It could however be connected to an external MMU that would enter the supervisor mode when the CPU entered restricted memory and later the 68030 included a proper MMU on chip. Even without a MMU the 68000 could catch segfaults which was used by Kickstart 2.4 on the Amiga to not bring down the whole machine when a single process crashed.

    2. Re:It was still alive? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The other was the use of cheap laptop chips in rack servers.

      Indeed. In the mid-90s, I often heard about the need for "big iron" in servers and data centers. Many people assumed that servers needed expensive high-powered CPUs and lots of memory, and this would be a lucrative market.

      I realized this was bullcrap when I visited Hotmail in 1996 (a year before they were acquired by Microsoft). I expected to see a few slick looking million dollar servers, each filling a rack from floor to ceiling. Nope. Instead there was some cheap metal shelving from home depot, covered with cardboard from some old boxes cut up into squares. On each square of cardboard was a cheap commodity motherboard running FreeBSD, and a $2 SLA battery. The cooling was some cheap clip-on desk fans from Walmart. No wonder they were able to provide email for free.

      That night I thought about what I had seen. If Hotmail could do it that way, anyone could. The next day I shorted Sun's stock.