Ah, porting to HP Superdome servers. It’s like being handed a brochure describing the intricate details of the iceberg the ship you just boarded is about to hit in a few days.

A fellow traveler, ahoy!

I worked on the Superdome servers back in the day. What a weird product. I still can't believe it was a profitable division (at my time circa 2011).

HP was going through some turbulent waters in those days.

Yes, some good times despite all the work.

The Itanic was kind of great :). I'm convinced it helped sink SGI.

Itanium did its most most important job: it killed everything but ARM and POWER.

Sunk by the Great Itanic ?

Why was the sinking of SGI great?

Oh, that wasn't the intent. I meant two separate things. The Itanic itself was kind of fascinating, but mostly panned (hence the nickname).

SGI's decision to built out Itanium systems may have helped precipitate their own downfall. That was sad.

Still makes me sad. I partially think a major reason for the demise was that it was simply constructed too soon. Compiler tech wasn't nearly good enough to handle the ISA.

Nowadays because of the efforts that have gone in to making SIMD effective, I'd think modern compilers would have an easier time taking advantage of that unique and strange uarch.

VLIW has a fatal flaw in how it was used in these systems. You cannot run general purpose dynamically scheduled workloads unless you combine the JIT engine and the scheduler. PRIOR ART. Which is the same exact problem of trying to run multiple compute kernels on a GPU at the same time. VLIW with an OS and runtime that uses a higher level language, Wasm or the JVM, could forseably support dynamic workloads where the main cpu was VLIW.

Now if they had been designed as GPU like devices for processing data, then Fortune 1000 would have never needed or used Hadoop.

SGI and HP! Intel should have a statue of Rick Belluzzo on they’r campus.

one of the best books on Linux architecture i've read was the one on the Itanium port

i think, because Itanic broke a ton of assumptions

This sounds interesting. Can you share the title of the book?