The Register just found 300-odd Itanium CPUs on eBay
- Reference: 1627618051
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/07/30/end_of_itanium_shipments/
- Source link:
In January 2019 the company issued an [1]advisory [PDF] warning that last orders for the CPU must be lodged by January 30th, 2020, and that final shipments would head out the door on July 29th, 2021.
Which was yesterday.
[2]
So concludes an odd story that started in the age of the minicomputer, when the likes of pre-split HP, Data General, Wang, and Prime dominated the server market with machines based on their own proprietary products.
[3]
[4]
By the mid-1990s, HP was worried that the minicomputer market was running out of steam because customers feared proprietary architectures would limit their software choices and lock them in to expensive ecosystems. But Sun was still in business, IBM never gave up on proprietary architectures, and DEC was telling anyone who would listen that its leap into the then-exotic realm of 64-bit CPUs with its Alpha platform represented a huge step forward.
HP therefore did a deal with Intel to use some of its research on a new architecture called Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, and its IA-64 instruction set, and turn it into a product. HP reckoned this tech would out-perform its few remaining minicomputer-derived rivals and Intel’s own server-directed efforts. Intel liked the idea of having another product line, so agreed to the arrangement. Major OS vendors were signed up to port their wares to Itanium, to make it a viable platform for all concerned.
[5]
Intel and HP made wrong calls. X86 performance improved, customers really were almost totally over minicomputer-like systems, and Itanium’s IA-64 architecture turned out to be speedy but hard to code for. Intel bailed on it in 2004.
Itanium quickly earned the nickname "Itanic" – a pun suggesting it was a supposedly brilliant innovation that sank on its maiden voyage.
[6]Intel IA-64 architecture to last 25 years
[7]ARM specs out first 64-bit RISC chips
[8]HP revs up Integrity, Superdomes for Itanium 9500s
Itanium did score plenty of decent wins, but never set the world on fire. IBM and Sun/Oracle ended up with the only sustainable proprietary stacks.
The few customers Itanium did attract were often the sort of outfits that don't and can't casually migrate to new platforms – The Register knows of a stock exchange that bet on it and has run the platform for almost two decades. The fact that Itanium had been directed at those with unusually demanding applications also meant that plenty of users had tightly coupled software and hardware.
Even though Itanium development slowed, and new releases offered modest performance improvements, the platform lived on. Intel's Xeon, meanwhile, improved in leaps and bounds and outpaced Itanium on core count and clock speed. The server virtualization boom made Xeon-based systems more flexible, and Itanium became a curiosity.
[9]
The product spluttered along through new releases in 2012 and 2017, but its death notice came in 2019 – and in February 2021 it was [10]ejected from the Linux kernel .
And, as noted above, shipments of the silicon ceased yesterday.
Which brings us to our headline: " The Register just found 300-plus Itanium CPUs on eBay". It's true! Some of the ads – like [11]this one depicting a brass rhinoceros may not be entirely convincing. However, plenty of [12]others depict working servers, CPUs, or other components an Itanium user may find handy.
So while Intel won't ship you a new Itanium anymore, plenty of others are happy to offload their old kit to help the few remaining users keep rumbling along.
Warning: check before buying this stuff. HPE has pledged to support Itanium until 2025, but may not be so keen on you using second-hand kit. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/02/01/pcn116733-00.pdf
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/servers&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YQPNtaNPwYYeeG8pI@MqVAAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/servers&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YQPNtaNPwYYeeG8pI@MqVAAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/servers&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YQPNtaNPwYYeeG8pI@MqVAAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/servers&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YQPNtaNPwYYeeG8pI@MqVAAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2000/04/09/intel_ia64_architecture_to_last/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2011/10/28/arm_holdings_arm_v8/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/09/hp_integrity_superdome_itanium_9500/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/servers&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YQPNtaNPwYYeeG8pI@MqVAAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/01/linux_pulls_itanium_support/
[11] https://www.ebay.com/itm/273798937775?hash=item3fbfb03caf:g:-kMAAOSw1Udcq62m
[12] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=Itanium&_sacat=0&_ipg=200
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
It was feature of PA-Risc and Itanium started life as PA3.
The instruction was heavily used in graphics too and at one point HP'S top graphic card for their workstations had 6 PA processors, all be it without memory management bits. Meanwhile the workstation would only have 1 PA processor.
Abandonware
""The Register just found 300-plus Itanium CPUs on eBay". It's true! Some of the ads – like this one depicting a brass rhinoceros may not be entirely convincing. However, plenty of others depict working servers, CPUs, or other components an Itanium user may find handy."
You have now completed your journey to Abandonware, IA64.
What's next ? An IA64 emulator and dumped images of popular IA64 SW builds ?
Re: Abandonware
I feel like I should see if I can find a rack mount since I've got space in the basement wooden rack for more servers...
Bring it out every now and again and try to do something even remotely useful with it.
*checks eBay.....*
On second thoughts let's not. Especially since there's only blade servers available for sane money. The only one I could get home and run is £2,400 (free shipping, bonus!) so sod that for a game of soldiers.
Re: Abandonware
I have a couple at home, bought a few years ago when linux distros and microsoft were still providing token support for it.
These machines are basically worthless now, but you have people who will continuously relist them on ebay for 50% of what they cost when new and wonder why they never sell.
A lot of companies will just junk the machines as scrap, or occasionally you'll find someone who wants to get rid of a whole pallet load of them for the cost of shipping.
Optimised in compiler
I seem to recall that part of the Itanium design was that the compiler would optimise the code rather than the CPU trying to figure it out at runtime, with all the out of order execution, branch prediction etc silicon that makes other CPUs more performant. To me, at the time, that sounded like a good idea; spend extra time at compile time to get efficient code rather than letting the silicon figure it out. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that there were several flaws here:
- It requires a good compiler; they were lacking at the time.
- It requires proper coding to maximise potential of the chip. Comment in the article highlights it was difficult to code for.
- Programmer time is expensive, more so than faster chips from Sun, IBM or even x86.
- CPU designs move over time; optimise for CPU x and CPU y will probably not work quite the same way.
Some good ideas in the chip, but the market moved before it was ready and it was practically obsolete by the time it shipped. AMD showed that you could have 64 bit CPUs which would still run legacy 32 bit code, so you didn't need to ditch everything to get 64 bit capabilities.
Re: Optimised in compiler
> AMD showed that you could have 64 bit CPUs which would still run legacy 32 bit code, so you didn't need to ditch everything to get 64 bit capabilities.
This is perhaps the biggest issue.
When the main part of DEC's Alpha dev team objected to being sold to Intel they upped sticks and moved en-masse to AMD with the result of them bringing out the AMD64 architecture. It could run the legacy x86 code so had a massive market place.
Intel had wanted x86 to die out, other people could make it. They'd hoped that IA64 would corner the market giving them a monopoly. There wasn't ever supposed to be an x86-64. But AMD and the Alpha design team forced their hand.
In the end they proved that it didn't matter how crap the instruction set was, what mattered was the market size as this controls the investment in research.
Intel had wanted to use that to drive Itanium, and this is why just about everyone in the business had signed up for Itanium initially. The expectation was that all the money was going to be thrown at IA64.
There were other issues too of course. The initial version of the chip, Merced which was designed at Intel was years late. The mark 2 processor, McKinley, which was designed at HP nearly over took it, as was detailed in stories here on El'Reg at the time. Merced ended up being little more that a developers platform.
But then AMD64 arrived and so many developers went off in that direction and took the market place and therefore the money with them. It doesn't matter how good your HW is without SW you can't sell any of it. I used to fill show stands with eager people demo'ing Unix workstations but when the buyers realised there were no apps do what they wanted they wondered off.
AMD64 allowed large flat memory models and so killed off the Unix workstation market place in a blink of an eye. Turns out it only existed because PCs had not been able to hold enough RAM to do many tasks. Linux could run most of the Unix apps with little or no tinkering. Lots of the dev teams for Unix apps already had their code running on Linux anyway as it was a free "yet another build platform" they could test their portability. Free to the extent it was often run on HW which was destined for the skip because it wouldn't run the latest version of Word on some admin's (not sys admin) desk.
The Register just found 300-plus Itanium CPUs on eBay"
So ALL the Itaniums ever sold are now for sale on ebay?
One of the reasons some people liked Itanic was because it had a fused multiply-accumulate instruction in its vector core, which is the building block for a lot of signal processing routines and a fair few image processing filters. X86/64 didn't. (Power PC did).
That kept Itanium ahead, then Intel finally added the instruction to Xeons in about 2011, after which there was zero reason for Itanium.