[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)

[postmodest]

I've had an Iris and an O2, and the sad fact is that your telephone is a faster computer than 100 O2's.

They're fun if you want to run the demos or load fsn and tell everyone in earshot "this is a Unix system! I know this!" But they're not even useful as X consoles to a Linux box these days, because of the compilation nightmare of getting recent network tools installed.

[cy384]

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

nope, I just like weird computers and distributed systems, itanium is possibly the weirdest CPU architecture that modern linux can run on, and SGI is an interesting part of computer history.

[mips_r4300i]

I have various SGI machines and while they are cool, they are pretty much useless except for toying around on. And extremely noisy. The O2 is the only one that's usable like a normal PC, except the plastics tend to break during shipping.

The rackmount Tezros and Origin 350s sound like they belong at the airport.

[usr1106]

I have also used a Tandem (probaby even a couple of years before the Cyclone came). But I wouldn't want one today before someone ports Linux to it :)

[sillywalk]

I've never used a Tandem (or as/400 or sgi) myself. Just find all of them interesting.

I assume Porting Linux to the pre-MIPS Tandem line would be a challenge. The Proprietary CPU was 'stack based' and very different from x86. Also, I don't know if Tandem ever sold compilers to do the sort of 'low level' system stuff to port another OS..

[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.