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Reorganization of 'Genres' Category

... Here's an interesting question: Itanium is as dead as Alpha and PA-RISC, but its commercial lifespan was from 2001 to 2020. Do we get to talk about those in the UNIX/Workstation forum, or is the body still too warm? ;)
I'd say Itanium Is are fair game, being roughly contemporary with late PIIIs.
 
I'd say Itanium Is are fair game, being roughly contemporary with late PIIIs.

I don't think anyone made a desktop Itanium workstation with anything newer than the Itanium II, but Itanium workstations in *any* form were so incredibly rare I imagine any line you drew would be pretty irrelevent.
 
Did anyone ever make an Itanium "workstation"? I only ever heard of servers.

HP made the i2000 (Itanium 1), zx2000 and zx6000 (Itanium 2) workstations. They were full-on workstations, even had AGP slots for their video cards.

Weird trivia about the Itanium 2 systems; they shared the same chipset as the last-ever C8000 PA-RISC workstation. (The zx2000 was in the same case.) Proof that even though Itanium came with Intel on the outside of the box it was in large part developed at HP.
 
SGI made the Prism, based on Altix 3000 series Itanium systems. Ran Linux, not IRIX. A Prism Extreme maxed out with 256 processors would have been (and would STILL be) a sweet system.
Oh wow. I did NOT know SGI was still building machines as late as 2005. I figured much like Sun their later systems were just off-the-shelf Intel or AMD x86 processors in fancy cases. Man that is awesome.

Am guessing even those late models are still pretty pricey though :p
 
... Here's an interesting question: Itanium is as dead as Alpha and PA-RISC, but its commercial lifespan was from 2001 to 2020. Do we get to talk about those in the UNIX/Workstation forum, or is the body still too warm? ;)
The Itanic had effectively sunk before ever a chip was even released. So yeah, vintage because it was like the chip was designed from the start never to be in current real-world use. :-) (And honestly, where else but in vintage forums could you even discuss it without people running away screaming, or perhaps beating you until you stopped talking?)
 
That is a fair point. No matter what Itanium is, its definitely 'niche', and that describes most of this forum.
 
I have a suggestion - under the UNIX/Linux genre, is there any way we could have subgenres, just to organize things better? Say Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, DEC? I think those are the five big ones, and then a sixth category for everything else. It would certainly make finding/reading/responding to posts a lot better, as many of those systems are very different from one another. Technically, you could even divide further by CPU type, but that might be going overboard. Just something to segregate the different brands.
 
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