[reidacdc]

On the one hand, I am not surprised -- at my workplace, we only ever had one Itanium system, an SGI Altix 3000-series computer. It was kind of niche even when we bought it, and core-for-core, the Itanium CPUs were slower than their competitors. What the SGI was really good at was MPI parallelism. I don't know how much of that was the CPU and how much was the overall system design of the Altix, which featured a pretty amazing interconnection fabric (CrayLink, I think?), and cache-coherency and a sophisticated memory model. But not all problems parallelized well, so the system ended up kind of being this weird outlier that was a good answer to some classes of problems, but you had to remember it existed.

On the other hand, it's a bit of a shame to formally, officially lose another option out of the computing ecosystem.

[cy384]

numalink, 1.6GB/s in 2003!

there's an altix 3000 on ebay that I'm kinda tempted by https://www.ebay.com/itm/174917876903

it only runs like one specific version of suse or red hat

[sillywalk]

I've always wanted an Indy or an O2,but other than running the demos, I don't know what I'd do with them. Also, high-end kit is also interesting, but again, I kind of want an Altix (or Origin 2000/3000), or .AS/400 or a Tandem Cyclone.. just because it's neat.

Do you have anything specific you'd do with an Altix 3000?

(I don't mean to sound snooty)

[drivebycomment]

It's not a shame. IA64 did more harm than good for the humanity and the computing industry. It was a dead-end architecture that should have died sooner than it did. Hubris and inertia kept it going much longer than it should have, and delayed so much of other progress. I would say good riddance.

[demondemidi]

Itanium succeeded in one area: giving armchair “experts” a chance to sound smart on forums like this.