<story><title>Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/13924/intel-to-discontinue-itanium-9700-kittson-processor-the-last-itaniums</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Klathmon</author><text>&amp;gt;most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy&lt;p&gt;This is completely off topic, but I&amp;#x27;ve seen things like the &amp;quot;^W^W&amp;quot; a few times before, and I don&amp;#x27;t know what it means.&lt;p&gt;Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor&amp;#x2F;system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?</text></item><item><author>q3k</author><text>Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal with in the name of backwards compatibility.</text></item><item><author>pcwalton</author><text>x86-64 is anything but &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot;. :)&lt;p&gt;Real mode, Mod R&amp;#x2F;M and SIB byte encoding weirdness, REX prefixes, 80-bit floats, parity flag, hard-wired registers for shifts&amp;#x2F;multiplies&amp;#x2F;divisions, builtin CRC32 over the wrong polynomial, Pascal calling convention support, binary-coded decimal, high halves of 16-bit registers, MMX overlap with x87 floating point, etc. etc.</text></item><item><author>q3k</author><text>Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started.&lt;p&gt;Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe designs possible: IA32&amp;#x2F;amd64. ARM was kinda quirky (conditional execution, barrel shifter), but those were slowly neutered (by introducing Thumb), and then totally thrown out of the window with aarch64. SPARC is dead. PA-RISC is dead. RISC-V is new and promising, but is also the most pragmatic and safe design of an ISA ever. The Mill CPU is interesting, but is underfunded and I don&amp;#x27;t think it will ever be taped out.&lt;p&gt;Similar as with OS research (think: Solaris, Plan9&amp;#x2F;Inferno), researchy and experimental CPU ISAs seem to be a thing of the past now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>q3k</author><text>Emacs&amp;#x2F;readline bindings for Delete Word. Open up a bash shell, type in `foo bar baz`, then press ctrl-W twice.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x27;^W&amp;#x27; is what would appear instead if you weren&amp;#x27;t in a readline&amp;#x2F;emacs editor, but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving &amp;#x27;^W&amp;#x27; behind makes it look like you didn&amp;#x27;t realize what you just corrected is still visible.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a joke. I&amp;#x27;ve now explained and ruined it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/13924/intel-to-discontinue-itanium-9700-kittson-processor-the-last-itaniums</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Klathmon</author><text>&amp;gt;most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy&lt;p&gt;This is completely off topic, but I&amp;#x27;ve seen things like the &amp;quot;^W^W&amp;quot; a few times before, and I don&amp;#x27;t know what it means.&lt;p&gt;Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor&amp;#x2F;system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?</text></item><item><author>q3k</author><text>Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal with in the name of backwards compatibility.</text></item><item><author>pcwalton</author><text>x86-64 is anything but &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot;. :)&lt;p&gt;Real mode, Mod R&amp;#x2F;M and SIB byte encoding weirdness, REX prefixes, 80-bit floats, parity flag, hard-wired registers for shifts&amp;#x2F;multiplies&amp;#x2F;divisions, builtin CRC32 over the wrong polynomial, Pascal calling convention support, binary-coded decimal, high halves of 16-bit registers, MMX overlap with x87 floating point, etc. etc.</text></item><item><author>q3k</author><text>Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started.&lt;p&gt;Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe designs possible: IA32&amp;#x2F;amd64. ARM was kinda quirky (conditional execution, barrel shifter), but those were slowly neutered (by introducing Thumb), and then totally thrown out of the window with aarch64. SPARC is dead. PA-RISC is dead. RISC-V is new and promising, but is also the most pragmatic and safe design of an ISA ever. The Mill CPU is interesting, but is underfunded and I don&amp;#x27;t think it will ever be taped out.&lt;p&gt;Similar as with OS research (think: Solaris, Plan9&amp;#x2F;Inferno), researchy and experimental CPU ISAs seem to be a thing of the past now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>otabdeveloper2</author><text>&amp;quot;^W&amp;quot; is this guy: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;End-of-Transmission-Block_character&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;End-of-Transmission-Block_char...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Unix line editors it is traditionally used to mean &amp;#x27;erase the previous word&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;See also documentation for ASCII (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.robelle.com&amp;#x2F;smugbook&amp;#x2F;ascii.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.robelle.com&amp;#x2F;smugbook&amp;#x2F;ascii.html&lt;/a&gt; for example) for origins of ^C, ^D, ^S, etc.</text></comment>