Yes, I’m a com­puter archi­tec­ture nerd. I expect this won’t sur­prise anyone.

The recent story on Microsoft end­ing sup­port for Itanium (side note: this is hardly news. No one ran Win­dows on Itanium in the first place) rekindled my love affair with the Itanium archi­tec­ture. Every six to twelve months I become infatu­ated with it all over again.

My infatu­ation usu­ally dies down when I real­ize the Itanium is out of reach for mere mor­tals. Some­times I day dream about when I’ve acci­dent­ally stumbled into money and I’m able to afford one. It’s hard to find a new Itanium server for under $30k and play­ing around with the online con­fig­ur­at­ors it’s not hard to run your­self into the half a mil­lion dol­lar range.

Today’s dif­fer­ent, though: today I decided to check out Ebay. Used Itanium serv­ers are actu­ally very cheap. Here’s one for $340. It’s only about 6 or 7 years out-​​of-​​date, too. Being out-​​of-​​date with Itanium isn’t such a big deal since they were never in-​​date to begin with. The pro­spect that I might be able to buy myself one as a gradu­ation present — when I have time to play with it — is exciting.

I won’t bore you with the details of Itanium and why it failed in its prom­ise to be the next big saviour, the one com­puter archi­tec­ture to bind them all. I was actu­ally going to write about why I love the Itanium so much, but before I knew it I’d writ­ten six para­graphs about how beau­ti­ful the archi­tec­ture is and real­ized no one but me would ever care to read it. Suf­fice it to say it’s the nicest archi­tec­ture I’ve ever seen, from the per­spect­ive of someone who truly enjoys writ­ing assembly code, the per­fect bal­ance between expos­ing the archi­tec­ture and hid­ing away the mundane details that some­time plagued RISC archi­tec­tures. Whenever someone fool­ishly asks me about Itanium — don’t worry, I’m usu­ally able to restrain myself — I describe it as “everything SPARC should have been”, SPARC being one of the more eleg­ant RISC archi­tec­tures to date.

For my pur­poses it doesn’t mat­ter if Itanium is prac­tical or pop­u­lar or well-​​fabricated or none of the above since it’s just for my own enjoy­ment. One of the biggest prob­lems is that no one’s man­aged to write a suit­able com­piler for it. That suits me just fine since I’d rather be writ­ing assembly code by hand or writ­ing my own com­piler for it. I’m actu­ally half con­vinced that if any­one actu­ally is going to write a bril­liant com­piler for Itanium, one that intel­li­gently takes advant­age of all its spec­u­lat­ive loads and rotat­ing register win­dows and sim­ilar toys that I like to drool over, it’s going to be a com­piler that has a ser­i­ous leg up in static ana­lysis, maybe for a lan­guage that’s been ser­i­ously restric­ted, for which my research would be appropriate.

Well I’m not so arrog­ant as to think that I can write a com­piler for Itanium where so some of the world’s top back-​​end developers have failed before. Even if fail­ure is nigh guar­an­teed, it would be a really fun chal­lenge, and it’s always more fun when the chal­lenge is inher­ent in the beauty of what you’re work­ing with. I think I may have to ser­i­ously put aside a few hun­dred dol­lars for after gradu­ation so I have this to play with.

Yes, I'm a computer architecture nerd. I expect this won't surprise anyone. The recent story on Microsoft ending support for Itanium (side note: this is hardly news. No one ran Windows on Itanium in the first place) rekindled my love affair with the Itanium architecture. Every six to twelve months I become infatuated with it ...