SPARC, IA64 Ports Of Ubuntu Face Decommissioning

[allquixotic]

My first thought when reading this article title: "What's Ubuntu Face? Some kind of weird-architecture remix of Ubuntu?... ... OHHH, face is a verb!"

Article title fail Otherwise, I agree with people n' stuff.

[deanjo]

IA-64 aka Itanium is dead

Well they are not dead. They still exist and are current. Last refresh to the line occured this February.

[Ex-Cyber]

IA-64 aka Itanium is dead and for SPARC-based systems Solaris is a much better choice.

And even SPARC is nearing the grave. New workstations with SPARC-CPUs are non-existent today. The last SPARC-based workstation was built by SUN in 2008. And on servers x86-CPUs offer a much better performance/price-ratio than SPARC-based systems.

So why should Canonical still support this CPUs?

I don't know that it's a good reason for Canonical in particular to support SPARC, but OpenSPARC ought to count for something...

[Shining Arcanine]

I had no idea that Canonical supported these platforms. I thought they were x86, x86_64 and ARM only. Anyway, Gentoo Linux supports these platforms. If any disenfranchised users would like a distribution that supports rarely used architectures in addition to the popular ones, they could look at Gentoo. Since it is a source based distribution, package maintainers are responsible for their packages on all supported architectures, so the amount of maintenance received does not really change much between architectures.

[brent]

Well they are not dead. They still exist and are current. Last refresh to the line occured this February.

No, Itanium is dead, really. Or to be more accurate, it's a dead horse.

[krazy]

No, Itanium is dead, really. Or to be more accurate, it's a dead horse.

That graphic is hilarious.

[next9]

No, Itanium is dead, really. Or to be more accurate, it's a dead horse.

Not so funny, because you completely missed the point. The biggest advantage of Itanium VLIW architecture is not performance, but reliability. While typical uptime of x86 machine can be 99,999% of year, IA-64 machines have 99,99999%, which means minutes vs. seconds of downtime. This makes Itanium perfect choice for solutions, where reliability demand is no 1 like HP-UX servers.

Yes, it is not for your home computer. But who cares....

[waucka]

Not so funny, because you completely missed the point. The biggest advantage of Itanium VLIW architecture is not performance, but reliability. While typical uptime of x86 machine can be 99,999% of year, IA-64 machines have 99,99999%, which means minutes vs. seconds of downtime. This makes Itanium perfect choice for solutions, where reliability demand is no 1 like HP-UX servers.

Yes, it is not for your home computer. But who cares....

Is that really because of the CPU family chosen? Would it be possible to get such reliability guarantees with a Xeon?

[next9]

Is that really because of the CPU family chosen? Would it be possible to get such reliability guarantees with a Xeon?

No. IA-64 has some interesting features x86 lacks. For example core-level lockstep is some kind of "raid" for processor core. It allows computational redundancy on hardware level, thus different cores can do the same task and verify the result or solve the computational failure... and not only among the cores of the same CPU, but also among the different sockets.

It is true Itanium can not beat Xeons and Opterons in price/performance comparison. But the task of these CPU is different - to be rockstable for applications, where it is necessary and crucial.

[brent]

Intel's Core i7 and AMD's newer Phenom/Opteron offerings implement some of the features allowing better reliability known from Itanium. They include much more advanced Machine Check Exception usage, for example.
I don't think you need Itanium for high availability anymore. x86 has made big steps in this area.