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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

Is there any point, even?

In my understanding, Itanium never went anywhere other than rare enterprise use, and never been anything more than a minority, inconvenient, uncompetitive architecture. At this point what servers remain will be slow, power hungry and unsupported.

Even if the kernel did support Itanium, how many projects are even building for it anymore, let alone taking care of making sure it still works?

Anything you can run on Itanium is almost certainly going to work better on AMD64.

Unlike something like the Amiga, it never had an enthusiast fanbase, and unlike say, SPARC or SGI hardware I don't think it ever had any fancy weird enterprise features you couldn't get on AMD64. The only motherboards I can find are from Supermicro, and they support up to 16 GB RAM, and have a PCI-X slot (that's the server-type version of PCI, before PCI Express).

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That's the question I was asking myself too when I read quotes such as:

> Frank Scheiner complained to the mailing list, saying that he and others had been working to resolve the problems with this architecture and had been rewarded by seeing it removed anyway

That sounds a lot like "sunk costs fallacy" - "we invested a lot of work into this, so we want to go on with it". But it doesn't answer if there are enough actual users left to justify this work?

Intel released the final version of Itanium in February 2017. They stopped taking orders in January 2020. They stopped shipping chips in July 2021. Long before that, the only real remaining enterprise solution using Itanium was Oracle on HP. Oracle wanted out and tried to end development on the platform around 2011-2012 but HP sued them and won, forcing them to continue support. I believe Oracle finally EOL'ed the platform at the end of 2021 and HP intends to EOL it at the end of 2025. So short answer is no, there is no point, it's a dead end platform.

In 5 years or so, after the current OSs those machines run go EOL, having an open source alternative OS to go to could become important for some uses.

Which ones would those be, though?

As far as I can tell, Itanium hardware is boring. It's PCI-X, DDR RAM, Ethernet, SCSI, USB. Stuff that's very common out there.

And software mostly appears to be ports of software available on AMD64.

If you do have some machine running custom built software to operate a factory or something then you wouldn't want to touch it. You'll just keep on replacing parts until it's time to redo it.

In fact, in my memory the one innovation it did bring was UEFI... which was so good that other architectures picked it up as well.

Which uses would that be?

The power/performance isn't right, rather quite wrong. You're better off buying a second hand x86-64 which draws less power and has more performance.

What uses? Even a raspberry pi 5 has better specs than all itaniums. Except maybe the last one, but obviously I don't have it at hand to test. And not many people do, considering that intel begrudgingly released it and didn't make an effort to sell it.

it's a piece of crap, but my 12 year old itanium box has 8 cores, sas controller, actual pcie ports, 10gb ethernet, and suppports up to 384GB of ram

unlike raspberry pi 5

say what you will about power efficiency and better options existing, but simply looking at the hardware, these are still capable machines

So instead of being replaced by a an embedded SBC, they could be replaced by... an inexpensive modern PC?

my inexpensive modern pc could also be replaced by a slightly newer inexpensive modern pc, so what?

the point at which a machine becomes unusably obsolete is a judgement call, and I only consider itanium obsolete because every OS has basically given up on it, not because of the hardware

That's fair. I've got some fully capable 32-bit x86 hardware that doesn't get the support which, it seems to me, it completely deserves. But like the enterprises that are almost fully transitioned away from Itanium, it's not like I'm actually willing to pay anyone to do the work.

It is exactly because of the hardware: Itaniums are pretty much unobtainable these days. This makes supporting software for these machines difficult and very expensive. This is the natural consequence of the manufacturer also having obsoleted it.

Even quite outdated PC is trivial to obtain and support in comparison. Also for Amigas and C64s software maintenance is vastly easier since there are practical emulators.

very true, I think if qemu or something had itanium emulation we might have seen longer community support

In 5 years it will be an 11+ year old CPU running on 7+ year old servers. These are enterprise database servers sitting in data centers not embedded machines sitting on a factory floor. The few still out there will be replaced over the next 2 years.

We are still running Oracle Rdb on a VAX.

I wish that I could remove unsupported systems after two years. That must be a nice place.

I have kept one Itanium server, just in case.

Interesting, like real hardware VAX, not something like Charon? What's it used for?

> In 5 years it will be an 11+ year old CPU running on 7+ year old servers.

My desktop is 12 years old and works completely fine. The major difference being that it's x86_64 so it keeps getting current software.

You will not be able to run rhel9 on this platform, as it requires V2 or above. You can't run Windows 11 either.

Under Linux, you can check with this script:

  #!/usr/bin/awk -f

  BEGIN {
  while (!/flags/) if (getline < "/proc/cpuinfo" != 1) exit 1
  if(/lm/&&/cmov/&&/cx8/&&/fpu/&&/fxsr/&&/mmx/&&/syscall/&&/sse2/)         l = 1
  if(l==1 &&/cx16/&&/lahf/&&/popcnt/&&/sse4_1/&&/sse4_2/&&/ssse3/)         l = 2
  if(l==2 &&/avx/&&/avx2/&&/bmi1/&&/bmi2/&&/f16c/&&/fma/&&/abm/&&/movbe/&&/xsave/)
                                                                           l = 3
  if(l==3 &&/avx512f/&&/avx512bw/&&/avx512cd/&&/avx512dq/&&/avx512vl/)     l = 4
  if(l > 0) { print "CPU supports x86-64-v" l; exit l + 1 }
  exit 1
  }

Thankfully, I am not running NT or RHEL.

Edit: I should say, I suppose it's a fair point that some distributions might eventually drop support for the exact CPU or hardware I have, but I expect this hardware to retain some level of support for a much longer period, especially from a kernel that hasn't even dropped 32 bit x86. It helps that if necessary I'm not above just going full Gentoo on it.

I would expect that Fedora has done the same as rhel.

I am certain that Intel Clear Linux requires at least v2.

"Clear Linux OS supports 2nd generation Intel Core (Sandy Bridge) CPUs and later, Xeon E3 and later, and Silvermont-based Intel Atom C2000 and E3800 processors... Minimum system requirements are SSE4 and CLMUL (carry-less multiplication), as well as UEFI."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Linux_OS

This will probably creep into more distros. I know that rhel8 clones are supported until 2028; that will probably be the time to retire my own Core 2 Duos/Quads.

Yeah, I would expect Fedora to be more aggressive about it than RHEL. IIRC SUSE was also talking about doing something similar. And sure, it's likely to be more common with time, but I expect some of the major distros to hold out for quite a long time - Debian and Slackware, in particular - but even if the big players all start requiring newer hardware there will be a long tail of distros like puppy linux to support old machines so long as the kernel and core software keep working.

Er, that script says my CPU is v2. Maybe because it's a Xeon? (It's ancient now, but this thing was a beast when it was made)

Core 2 was v1.

It looks like the first i3/i5/i7 generation (Clarkdale or Arrandale) was v2.

And replacing the CPU with the very best that the motherboard can handle is probably less than $10 on eBay.

>Anything you can run on Itanium is almost certainly going to work better on AMD64.

I worked on a project targeting hp superdomes (PA RISC). When that architecture was on its way out they started looking at amd64 as a replacement though Itaniun was the “successor” to hp risc and could run hpux (HP was involved somehow). It really never took off. The advance compilers that would give itanium software speed never really happened.

HP wasn't just involved, it was their baby from the beginning. But they realized that the investment was too large and risky and Intel needed a 64-bit arch. So they partnered up.

Yep, if you look at the Itanium Wikipedia article, it says 'Designed by: Intel, Hewlett-Packard'.

I have nothing useful to comment other than hope and whimsy.

Hope: I loved the idea that the linux kernel not only freed new software from the shackles of corporate influence, but elevated old hardware and pushed them to reach their full potential using new CS concepts.

Whimsy: I loved the idea that a time traveller from 2036 could take a modern linux kernel and run it on a 1976 IBM 5100, and debug various legacy program issues that existed in the future. The Linux kernel is the best weapon we can give to such a traveller.

Such traveller can use a snapshot of a Linux distro from 2010. Just because it is out of mainline, it doesn't mean that the past disappeared.

A major part of hardware preservation is software preservation. We can't expect Linux in 2023 to still support i386, but we have several Slackware ISO images that contain everything we need to operate this machine.

Itanium never had much potential to begin with, and the amount of systems that ever made it out of corporate vaults can probably be counted on two hands. If those companies want to fix their decades of neglect, they can pay kernel maintainers for the upkeep.

I thought it was a marketing gimmick to get big iron competitors off homebrew risc solutions. Because Intel.

When it started, there was concern that CISC x86 was hitting a performance wall and Intel really wanted something which was locked up so other companies like AMD, Cyrix, etc. couldn’t clone it.

The part where it went wrong was a highly speculative bet on the academic argument that a simpler CPU with a smarter compiler was the future. HP and Intel bet the farm on that panning out, but they ran into a number of setbacks and the competition wasn’t giving them time to recover. Itanium was late and slower than predicted, and both RISC and x86 got a lot faster since they could focus on features like speculative execution and SIMD while Intel was pouring resources into fundamentals dealing with all of the perils of a new architecture, especially one which has significantly different performance trade offs. The original pitch was that Itanium would be faster, but most people found it to be significantly slower even on native code – compilers weren’t as good at finding instruction level parallelism as hoped – and once you factored in the cost it was irrecoverable: nobody is paying twice as much for a server which is half as fast on the hope that in years to come improved compilers might get closer to parity.

The real winner was Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Linux: part of this switch involved a lot of RISC vendors giving up and switching to Windows. Companies like HP, SGI, etc. scrubbed their plans to focus on Itanium systems but they didn’t go back to their proprietary Unix variants.

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