

Oracle Ceases Development For Intel’s Itanium Chip - ukdm
http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/20110323/oracle-ceases-development-for-intels-itanium-chip/

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npalli
Money quote "... In so doing it reminded the world that the Itanium chip
exists at all"

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cagenut
This is more about Ellison and Hurd poking HP in the eye than technical merit.
Itanium is a niche product for sure, but its selling, its sales are growing,
and it provides a huge wealth of r&d "ip" (in the talented staff sense) when
it comes to the problem intel has to solve every year "we have twice the
transistors we did for the last design... what are we gonna do with them".

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podperson
Microsoft abandoned it last year, and in January Intel discontinued compiler
support. Not exactly the first rats to leave...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium>

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bodyfour
The loss of Intel compiler support is really telling. IA-64 leans very heavily
on its compiler to get good performance -- it's almost as much a compiler
project as a silicon one.

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azim
Discontinuing a support for a product developers don't use isn't really
telling at all. Most Itanium development is done using compilers from the
operating system vendor, not with ICC. Intel still provides the code
generators for those compilers.

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tyhjmhytgfv
It is if the only selling point for the chip was it's advanced capabilities if
you used the custom compiler.

If people are only buy Itaniums to run legacy x86 code THAT is significant -
it would be like Apple announcing sales of Macbooks but admitting everyone
just used them to run Windows

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whatusername
Is there anyone on HN who can speak in Itanium's defense? Anyone used it and
been impressed? We've all heard the Itanic jokes -- but surely there was some
gold buried in there?

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azim
I did software development for NonStop Kernel on Itanium for a few years. 5
years ago, Itanium was FAST. Our software was twice as fast as competitors who
used twice as many processing cores. Problem was that, unlike x86, Intel's
Itanium roadmap moves slow and continually plagued by problems. About 2-3
years ago, with cost reduction in mind, we began porting software over to
Linux on x86. Initially we needed 2.5x as many x86 cores to reach the
performance of the 1.6Ghz Itanium 2. By the time Intel began shipping
Westmere-EP processors early in 2010, each core was nearly 1:1 with Itanium,
and at half the cost and 3x the density.

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whatusername
Interesting. The NonStop has always intrigued me as a platform. Thanks.

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prodigal_erik
I can understand Microsoft and Red Hat, because it takes actual work for an OS
to be intimately aware of the architecture. But for Oracle wouldn't it just be
running a cross compiler and testing on another set of boxes?

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MichaelGG
Doesn't Oracle build Java now? Building a competitive JVM requires a fair
amount of knowledge of the underlying architecture.

On top of that, it's hardly trivial or cost-free as "just be running a cross
compiler and testing on another set of boxes" sounds. My guess is they've done
the calculations, and Itanium doesn't earn them more money.

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bodyfour
Or rather "earns them less money then they can make from selling SPARC
Enterprise M-series machines to former HP Superdome customers"

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prodigal_erik
If a customer was screwed by the Itanium end-of-life, and responds by choosing
SPARC (under Oracle's custody) to migrate to, they almost deserve what's
happening to them.

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wooptoo
Itanic.

