{"id":559785,"date":"2026-07-20T23:21:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T23:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/559785\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T23:21:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T23:21:11","slug":"sail-virtually-aboard-the-itanic-with-ia-64-emulator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/559785\/","title":{"rendered":"Sail Virtually Aboard The \u201cItanic\u201d With IA-64 Emulator"},"content":{"rendered":"

Intel\u2019s Itanium architecture was an interesting experiment, but it has gone down in history as one of the chip giant\u2019s bigger flops, so much so that it earned the name \u201cItanic\u201d in the tech press. This is perhaps unfair, considering it did limp on until a quiet EOL in 2020. We didn\u2019t know anyone missed it, but perhaps it was more the technical challenge than nostalgia for obsolete server hardware that led [Yufeng Gao] and [gdwnldsKSC] to spin up an instruction-set translator for the late, lamented, IA-64 architecture.<\/a><\/p>\n

Note that it\u2019s very much in alpha, version 0.1, so don\u2019t expect all the things. Neither HP-UX and OpenVMS will boot, which is a pity since Itanium\u2019s great success was arguably winning those OSes and thereby killing the bespoke architectures HP and DEC had at the time. Gentoo can get to a shell, as long as you use Kernel 6.6 or older, and Windows Server 2003 and XP-64 both apparently boot.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not incredibly performant, with 486-level speeds when running on Ryzen 5000 series hardware, but then, it is a 64-bit hardware being emulated here, and pretty weird hardware at that. Itanium\u2019s Very Long Word Instruction architecture was notoriously hard to program well. Specifically, it was hard to compile optimized programs for, so we expect optimizing an emulator is going to be similarly difficult. That\u2019s why this is so impressive, even at this early stage.<\/p>\n

The late, unlamented Itanium<\/a> is probably one of the few systems not in the Virtual OS Museum<\/a>, but perhaps eventually this project will change that.<\/p>\n

via Raymii.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Intel\u2019s Itanium architecture was an interesting experiment, but it has gone down in history as one of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80],"class_list":["post-559785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}