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23:03:37
aeth
DEC Alpha was actually killed by Itanium. I guess they figured that they couldn't compete with Intel there so they... very prematurely gave up.
23:09:46
p_l
aeth: when Alpha was canceled, it was the speed leader, Itanium was still "will be available soon, honestly", and pretty much everyone outside of decision making circle was caught flat footed
0:39:54
p_l
Aurora_v_kosmose: yes, but with alpha I only need to get one of the many complete computer systems built with it
0:40:20
Aurora_v_kosmose
And I mean, reasonably, not like Lisp Machines which will merely cost you a few millions.
0:41:31
p_l
that one is reasonably hard to find, because chances are it is still running production workload
0:42:54
p_l
Aurora_v_kosmose: the "shocking!" revelation to HP was that customers didn't want to buy Itanium :>
0:45:18
p_l
end result was that outside of supercomputing, Itanium was left with two groups of customers, the people who somehow ended up running HP-UX (I might have actually encountered a case few years ago), and people running OpenVMS who for some reason couldn't get alphas or needed something specific to I64 systems
0:57:24
p_l
aeth: Itanium was pretty much dead within few years of actually arriving, and it was half-dead on arrival
0:58:04
aeth
Right, my joke is that writing a compiler for Itanium is a job that probably no one here is even capable of doing.
1:07:59
TheInformaticist
OK, this is weird. ERC is automatically signing me into #lisp when I log in (or freenode is). Any idea why?
1:15:34
Nilby
The Alpha was the machine that was the fastest the longest in an office that got every new computer, so it was quite far ahead. It was a decent choice to to put Genera on.
1:21:20
Nilby
Sometimes I think some exec at intel asked some exec at HP to buy alpha and kill it so they didn't have to worry anymore.
1:22:42
p_l
best summary I figured ever was that Compaq was very happy being intel's sock puppet and figured being competitors wasn't in their plans and happily folded when intel announced their "RISC killer"
1:23:35
p_l
then, after merger with HP, everyone found out that Chipzilla released a lame duck, and HP was forced by the market to restart production of last alpha design
1:25:24
p_l
the only remaining non-HP itanium vendor quickly turned out to be SGI, and they ended up both dumping it, moving to Xeons, and being bought by shitty company (Rackable)
1:27:07
p_l
Nilby: major groups involved in Alpha development were taken by surprise, among them Microsoft and Compaq (formerly DEC) "NT on Alpha" team
1:29:41
p_l
not only process updates, the real strength behind intel, failed, but also various dirty tricks they picked up to keep the precious single-core speeds up ended up backfiring spectacularly
1:32:37
Nilby
yeah, i now regard the intel chips with a bit of suspicion, and wish they would just let us program the microcode
1:35:08
prumnopytis
Hey, does anyone know about using GPGME's cl [cffi] ? I found I wasn't able to successfully asdf load it under sbcl 2.0.5
1:46:27
prumnopytis
I'm not really sure how to debug asdf's COMPILE-FILE-ERROR. it caches a fasl, but I'm not sure what it wants to tell me.
1:46:29
Nilby
p_l: maybe someday they'll do microscopy to vhdl/simulator and we'll see, but in the meantime I'm glad to be able to bring any chip to a crawl with CL.
1:47:34
prumnopytis
Also sorry to come late to a party but Nilby are you talking about running common lisp on some interesting chips? I was ignoring some research I should probably read somewhere and it sounds like you might be talking about that.
1:49:19
p_l
well, on the interesting and actually powerful front is recent revival of SBCL on power, including proper 64bitness iirc
1:50:06
Nilby
I have no idea what I'm talking about, but p_l is a smart person. https://irclog.tymoon.eu/freenode/%23lisp
1:51:18
p_l
hopefully the issues with POWER10's openness are solved and RCS will make POWER10 systems too :<
1:57:19
aeth
POWER's problem is that it's too expensive. Billion dollar companies will gladly rely on FOSS libraries written by hobbyists, but those hobbyists probably only have access to x86-64 and ARM.
1:58:33
p_l
aeth: RCS made computers in the same price range as x86-64 workstations (actual workstations, that is)
2:11:09
aeth
p_l: Yeah, actual workstations. Meanwhile, you can get a budget 12-core not-quite-workstation for the price of a 3900X.
2:12:05
p_l
aeth: true. That's why the projects I mentioned would have significant benefits related to not having x86 hollywood&netflix-encumbered cpus
2:17:04
prumnopytis
Interesting but not exactly my area of hardware design. So there was a 2020 tech show debut of some scalable parallel processing-y machine (POWER10).
2:38:13
sm2n
prumnopytis, from what I recall, when I looked into it a while back, gpgme's cl bindings are unmaintained for a long time and have bitrotted
2:44:10
prumnopytis
I found that gentoo's package management has stuck to a somewhat ancient version of sbcl, but allegedly also has gpgme [and gpg-error] for cl for that. I wonder if that's why that's like that.
2:50:54
prumnopytis
sm2n: I mean that's the fallback I was planning, but everywhere in gpgme's docs it said "no, don't do specifically that use gpgme" so I was wondering if I was just insufficiently powerful with asdf
2:52:46
prumnopytis
gpgme as a C library seems to be totally fine, so I was hoping to do something a little more formal than run-programming gpg. But for now I shall just do as you say